As defined in Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Web 2.0…refers to a perceived second generation of web-based  communities and hosted services  - such as social-networking sites,  wikis and folksonomies  -  which facilitate collaboration and sharing between users .
• Is not an update to Web technical specifications.  Instead…“it is a change in how we use the internet”

Web 2.0 is defined as a set of Web-based software services that encourage users to become more involved in the creation and manipulation of data. Web 2.0 websites allow users to do more than just retrieve information.

As the name suggests, Web 2.0 represents an important shift in the way digital information is created, shared, stored, distributed, and manipulated. In the years ahead, it will have a significant impact in the way businesses use both the Internet and enterprise-level IT applications. The phrase “Web 2.0” was first coined by Darcy DiNucci in 1999 but came into notice in the year 2004 when O'Reilly Media and MediaLive hosted the first 2.0 web conference.
 
Web 2.0 is simply a marketing strategy using one or many of the social media outlets. Those outlets are broken down into 6 different types:

1. Social Networking - the most popular of these outlets include Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, DirectMatches, Ryze and Orkut in india.
2. Social Bookmarking - well known ones include Digg, Technorati, Del.icio.us, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. Originally, social bookmarks were places you could store your favorite bookmarks online, so that you could access your bookmarks from anywhere, not just your own computer. Social bookmarking has evolved as people began to share their bookmarks with others.
3. Content Sharing - best known sites for content sharing are Wikipedia, Squidoo, Hubpages, Gather and E-zine Articles. Content sharing sites are great for people who don't have any web skills but want to share content on the internet.
4. Media Sharing - most well known are YouTube, Flickr, SlideShare, JamGlue;
5. Blogging – these are online dairies which facilitate the readers to post interactive comments. They are primarily textual, although some focus on art (Art blog), photographs (photoblog), videos (Video blogging), music (MP3 blog), and audio (podcasting). Microblogging is another type of blogging, featuring very short posts. The most popular amongst them are Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, etc.
6. Adapters - Amazon, Google Products, Cafe Press - these are traditional websites that "adapted" their products to the social marketing scene. 

In all, we can say that Web 2.0 is a compact form of technologies, people, and attitude merged together, that has created an important shift in the way we think about and use the Internet. It facilitates a number of ways to benefit business by saving time and money, and offering a new mode of interaction with customers. Though, it has advantages of emerging technologies but must be used keeping the security aspects in mind.

  

Being able to drive traffic to a website, generate sales, create advertising income and also act as an efficient customer service tool, a blog is fast becoming part of the marketing strategy for most companies worldwide. Here are the top 9 reasons why you should blog to improve your website ranking:

1. You become known as an expert in your field
Use a blog to easily share your knowledge and expertise on a specific niche area is a great advantage to business. A Blog gives you a place where you can write in your own voice and establish yourself as a trusted expert.

2. Blogs get you more traffic from search engines
Search engines love blogs and blog directories because of their built-in notification features and also because bloggers continually add fresh content to their blogs. Blogs also get traffic from highly popular social networking search engines like Technocrati, DIGG and Reddit.

3. Podcasts – easily shared
Podcasting refers to a very low cost medium that enables you to share tailored and targeted content with your audience. Another benefit is given by RSS technology that enables your audience to subscribe to your website podcasts and blogs and pull content they I want from you. Podcasts can also be easily downloaded.

4. Interactive FAQ section
Your blog can also have an interactive FAQ section where customers can ask questions and you can interactively answer them. How great would it be to get your questions answered right away!

5. Blogs are free
You can set up a blog in minutes for free using wordpress.com or blogger.com.

6. You can update your blog without a webmaster
Updating your blog with fresh content is easy to do: you won’t need a webmaster to do that for you. You can work at your own pace and you don’t have to spend extra money.  If you post valuable information on a regular basis, it will boost your credibility and establish you as an expert in your field.

7. Start a series of How-To articles
You can put up articles and explain various concerns in your industry. This will save your readers time spent looking it up and give proof that your company knows what they’re doing, creating a greater chance for sales.

8. Easily connect with your visitors
Your blog can be a great means of communication between your customers who want to share their comments, feedback, ideas and concerns with you.

9. Blog content density is better than your website’s
As mentioned earlier, search engines give blogs a higher rank and active blogs are indexed on a more regular basis than websites because of continuously available new content.

Every time you are surfing the net you encounter something known as TLDs. After all what is it and how is it used?  TLDs are the Top Level Domains and they are the last part of an Internet domain name. Let’s take an example, in the domain name Arnima.com, the top-level domain is the three letters “com”. Look it’s not any more complicated than that!

The top-level domains (TLDs) are the highest level of domain names of the Internet.  The Domain Name System was created in the 1980s, and then the domain name space was divided into two main groups of domains. The country code top-level domains (ccTLD) were primarily based on the  territory codes of ISO-3166 country abbreviations. On the other hand, a group of seven generic top-level domains (gTLD) was implemented which represented a set of categories of names and multi-organizations.


gTLDs - Generic domains
 
A gTLD, is a top-level domain and is used in particular by a specific type of organization. These generic TLDs are three or more letters long, and they're named to be a good fit to the organization.
When top-level domains were first implemented, in January 1985, there were seven gTLDs:
•    ARPA --  Advanced Research Projects Agency
•    COM -- commercial
•    EDU -- educational establishments (primarily U.S.)
•    GOV -- U.S. government
•    NET -- network infrastructure
•    ORG -- non-profit organizations
•    MIL -- U.S. military


You must have come across with the most popular domain extensions on the web -  .BIZ, .NAME, .MOBI, etc. They are all known as generic top-level domains (gTLDs) and are open for registration to all users worldwide, regardless of their citizenship, residence or age.
 
•    unsponsored top-level domains: domains operating directly under policies established by ICANN processes for the global Internet community.
•    sponsored top-level domains (sTLD): The private organizations proposed  and sponsored these domains Use is based on community theme concepts.
•    infrastructure top-level domain: It's a group that consists of one domain, the Address and Routing Parameter Area (ARPA). It is managed by IANA.


ccTLD - Country Code Top-Level Domain

ccTLD is an Internet top-level domain generally used or reserved for a country or a dependent territory.
Each country has a unique two-character abbreviation which is added at the end of the domain name (e.g. .us for US, .de for Germany, .uk for United Kingdom, .in for India, etc). Some countries have sold the rights to their ccTLDs (e.g. Tuvalu and .tv).
 
A new add-on to this is a group of internationalized domain name (IDN) top-level domains that has been installed under test for testing purposes. The countries and territories may apply for IDN ccTLDs from November 2009.
You may refer to the following links for the authoritative list of currently existing TLDs in the root zone:-
 http://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/ and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains

Landing Pages vs Mircosites

While they are different from one another, microsites and landing pages are both used in conjunction with search engine optimization, search engine marketing and online advertising for more targeted content.

Landing Pages
Landing pages are usually one-page creations that focus on a particular offer and specifically on leading the visitor to take certain action. Landing pages are used for direct marketing campaigns and are considered to be essential to the success of these campaigns. All savvy marketers use and test hundreds of different landing pages in order to optimize conversion rates.

Microsites
Microsites are one or more Web pages used for a number of purposes:

-Consumer goods companies may market a new product, because the main website may leave the product underexposed; a microsite will focus on that particular product or service and provide extensive details and information.

-A magazine may want cover a time-sensitive and popular event, such as the upcoming presidential election or some world championship and may leverage a microsite.

-A software company may offer its clients more information on a product, which cannot be posted on a simple landing page and adding several pages to its main website would mean burying the information and relying on visitors to feel their way through to the specific information.

In most cases microsites and landing pages are created to convert visitors into leads. Microsite also result in increased SEO opportunities.  Microsites are typically hosted on a different domain than the primary website and contain sometimes multiple pages of topic-related content for high organic search rankings. Most savvy marketers tend to use both microsites and landing pages somewhere along the way. And if microsites are hosting on multiple- C IPs (SEO-hosting), the results can be even more considerable.