My best wishes to everyone!

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Have a wonderful Holiday Season!

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10 ways to "get ink"

is the title of a great post on the Ask 37signals blog. It's great advice that I can fully subscribe to and recommend. Doesn't really have anything to do with technology but is valid in a general sense.

By the way, I did watch Steve Martin on Charlie Rose, one of my favorite TV shows for which I have a TiVo season pass. One of the best and most knowledgeable interviewer of all times.

 

Word of Mouth Vs. Key Influencers

is the title of a column by Guy Kawasaki in AlwaysOn. It covers a study on the effectiveness of different kinds of word of mouth. I tend to agree with the results and Guy's comments.



The most effective WOM is by family, friends and colleagues, followed by regular folk and then pundits or those "in the know". If this was not the case, we'd be right back in the days of old media with the control over, or filtering of  the message by editors and professionals. Those days are fast fading away as social media asserts itself.

 

From zero to 100 million......

After 10 Years of Blogs, the Future's Brighter Than Ever
Wired reports and I'm sure few knew who first coined the phrase "weblog".
Well here he is. Jorn Barger



And according to the comments section another fellow claims to have started blogging from Japan in '96.

We sure have come a long way since then and the landscape of communications has changed significantly and will continue to change as social media will become even more mainstream and the percentage of contributors rather than readers increases.

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The Machine is U

this video is a great description and visualization of the web today and how it will develop beyond 2.0 by adding intelligence

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Hat tip to Stephen Joyce for bringing it to my attention.

Check this out, pretty useful stuff.

found this about The website marketing mind map on Hotelmarketing.com It sums up web based marketing in a visual and effective way.

 

A brilliant video on bubble 2.0

or, will it be different this time around?

Here Comes Another Bubble - The Richter Scales

hat's off to Fake Steve Jobs for the tip

Talk about relevant messaging!

and who can express it more succinctly than the Brits: SatLav scheme takes the piss out of Westminster as reported here by Absolute Gadget.

And fear not Americans, as synchronicity would have it, a similar service is being announced in several North American cities today -- including Atlanta, Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Manhattan, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Oakland, Portland, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, Toronto, and Washington D.C. The new service is called MizPee (www.mizpee .com) from Yojo Mobile (www.yojomobile.com).

Who will ever doubt again the utility of the web for all of us in one of life's most dire situations.....!

 

The Next Big Thing: User-Contributed Metadata

is the title of a great post on the Minding the Planet blog about new developments that will have a significant impact on how we experience and use the web.

It will be exciting to follow sites such as Twine when fully rolled out and how they will take what we today loosely call user generated content to a whole new level by adding richer data elements and semantics.

I expect this to have an impact on travel as well and bring improvements to today's user experience of travel sites. In light of the reported decrease in the number of online travelers a welcome and needed next step in the evolution of the market.

 

Travolution Blog: Travolution Autumn Conference

Can meta search move beyond flights and price? raises a valid question.

Ever since the start of online travel the focus has always been on the lowest price. This was reinforced by most media stories and became the mantra, much to the detriment of online travel agencies, who after all are intermediaries, and need to make profit to survive.

With the introduction of meta search that focus became even stronger, with added transparency making price comparison total.

Paul Furner is right that there needs to be more than price in the equation as otherwise all travel risks to be commoditized even further, as has largely happened with airplane seats, not the least due to their dominant share in the overall online travel market.

What's disappointing, is that many travelers seem to no longer realize that in travel - as any other product or service - you get what you pay for!

The sooner the developments now starting to be seen on the semantic - or intelligent - web become available for use in travel the better. This type of enhanced data will very likely make meta search better and develop in the direction of adding more evaluation criteria than price.

Here's a new take on a well known saying I like....

Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he'll buy a funny hat. Talk to a hungry man about fish, and you're a consultant.

Scott Adams, Dogbert; Dilbert cartoons
US cartoonist (1957 - )

Radar Networks' Twine: Semantic Web meets information overload

Here's a more detailed description of what Twine is about and it seems to me an improvement over what we've seen so far in social networking tools.

Nova Spivack thinks it's high time we make computers smart enough to manage the ocean of scattered information our digital lives create.

At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Friday, Spivack will officially take Radar Networks, the start-up he co-founded, out of stealth mode and show off Twine, a Web service for managing information, using your social network and the Semantic Web.

With Twine, people collect different pieces of information in a single place and let other people add to that collection. People can e-mail items into Twine, bookmark Web pages or upload documents. To add tags, people fill in a form.

The software is smart enough to create tags itself after mining through the content, which can be text, audio or video. It also taps into the collective knowledge of Wikipedia to categorize information.

Radar Networks' Twine service for managing Web info and collaborating.

Under the covers, Radar Network's server is using natural language processing and Semantic Web technology to get a better idea of the meaning of a person's collected information.

"This is the user experience side of the Semantic Web," said Spivack. "Our motto is 'people are lazy.' Who wants to spend their time being a librarian?...That's what we made computers for."

The idea behind the Semantic Web is that Web content has embedded data that allows applications to "talk" to each other. With that self-describing information, summed up in the RDF (Resource Description Framework) format, software agents can act on information, making life easier for Web users.

Spivack said that the Twine "knowledge networking" service really shines when used for collaboration. People can share information on a certain subject and get notifications when someone in their social network posts something new. The more information Twine gathers, the better it gets at recommendations and understanding a user's preferences.

Radar Networks' plan is to offer a free service that is advertising-supported and to introduce a line of premium services, which would be more geared toward business users.

Also in store are a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that will let outside developers write applications on its platform. Spivack said that Radar Networks intends to follow the same strategy that Salesforce.com has in building its online development platform AppExchange, which provides a foundation for building third-party applications.

The Radar Networks platform is based on Web standards RDF and OWL (Web Ontology Language), which means that information can be transported into another service, says Spivack.

Twine.com

is the name of the just launched site by Radar Networks  at Web2.0 Summit and it claims to be a Revolutionary Semantic Web Application. Having followed the company and their CEO Nova Spivack for some time, I believe this to be an exciting new development in what's coming next on the web - also called web 3.0 by some, a new term that will most likely be as controversial and misunderstood as web 2.0 is by many today.



I can't imagine that this kind of technology will not have an impact on travel, at least as significant as the web 2.0 tools are having at present. In addition the semantic web promises to affect and even transform collaboration even more than web 2.0 has done.

Information R/evolution

Embedded Video a fascinating video about what's happening all around us with information and how  it is used, absorbed, changed, improved, collected, spread and on and on.....

It's a great take on the book Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger.

Very insightful commentary

by Nova Spivak Understanding The Semantic Web: A Response to Tim O'Reilly's Recent Defense of Web 2.0 on his Minding the Planet blog. As he states, it's too early to tell how the next phase in the development of the web will shake out but it promises to be exciting to say the least.

 

Enemybook and Snubster anyone?

Here comes the antidote to all those friends requests that you might not really want to accept sometimes, New Facebook Apps That Explore Dark Side of Relationships let you start an enemy list. How about that for making a statement of being less than in a social mood sometimes and keep certain people at arms length....!

And the founder of Enemybook already was interviewed on NPR's Day to Day program. Try getting that exposure with your plain vanilla app!

 

Predictions are hard, especially those about the future!

Today's Web 3.0 Nonsense Blogstorm  

• The debate about what's coming next on the web is on and the terminology is as controversial as ever!


• The numbers game might well be on the way out.


• The heavyweights are weighing in what it's about.

Make me earn it!

This post has nothing to do with my usual blog theme, but I thought it well worth quoting from a recent Wall Street Journal article, via the Marketing Ladder newsletter. It's about a professor at my daughter's alma mater:

    Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon University computer-science professor, was about to give a lecture Tuesday afternoon, but before he said a word, he received a standing ovation from 400 students and colleagues.



    He motioned to them to sit down. "Make me earn it," he said.



    They had come to see him give what was billed as his "last lecture." This is a common title for talks on college campuses today. Schools such as Stanford and the University of Alabama have mounted "Last Lecture Series," in which top professors are asked to think deeply about what matters to them and to give hypothetical final talks. For the audience, the question to be mulled is this: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance?



    It can be an intriguing hour, watching healthy professors consider their demise and ruminate over subjects dear to them. At the University of Northern Iowa, instructor Penny O’Connor recently titled her lecture "Get Over Yourself." At Cornell, Ellis Hanson, who teaches a course titled "Desire," spoke about sex and technology.



    At Carnegie Mellon, however, Dr. Pausch’s speech was more than just an academic exercise. The 46-year-old father of three has pancreatic cancer and expects to live for just a few months. His lecture, using images on a giant screen, turned out to be a rollicking and riveting journey through the lessons of his life.



    He began by showing his CT scans, revealing 10 tumors on his liver. But after that, he talked about living. If anyone expected him to be morose, he said, "I’m sorry to disappoint you." He then dropped to the floor and did one-handed pushups.



    Clicking through photos of himself as a boy, he talked about his childhood dreams: to win giant stuffed animals at carnivals, to walk in zero gravity, to design Disney rides, to write a World Book entry. By adulthood, he had achieved each goal. As proof, he had students carry out all the huge stuffed animals he’d won in his life, which he gave to audience members. After all, he doesn’t need them anymore.



    He paid tribute to his techie background. "I’ve experienced a deathbed conversion," he said, smiling. "I just bought a Macintosh." Flashing his rejection letters on the screen, he talked about setbacks in his career, repeating: "Brick walls are there for a reason. They let us prove how badly we want things." He encouraged us to be patient with others. "Wait long enough, and people will surprise and impress you." After showing photos of his childhood bedroom, decorated with mathematical notations he’d drawn on the walls, he said: "If your kids want to paint their bedrooms, as a favor to me, let ’em do it."



    While displaying photos of his bosses and students over the years, he said that helping others fulfill their dreams is even more fun than achieving your own. He talked of requiring his students to create videogames without sex and violence. "You’d be surprised how many 19-year-old boys run out of ideas when you take those possibilities away," he said, but they all rose to the challenge.



    He also saluted his parents, who let him make his childhood bedroom his domain, even if his wall etchings hurt the home’s resale value. He knew his mom was proud of him when he got his Ph.D, he said, despite how she’d introduce him: "This is my son. He’s a doctor, but not the kind who helps people."



    He then spoke about his legacy. Considered one of the nation’s foremost teachers of videogame and virtual-reality technology, he helped develop "Alice," a Carnegie Mellon software project that allows people to easily create 3-D animations. It had one million downloads in the past year, and usage is expected to soar.



    "Like Moses, I get to see the Promised Land, but I don’t get to step foot in it," Dr. Pausch said. "That’s OK. I will live on in Alice."



    Many people have given last speeches without realizing it. The day before he was killed, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke prophetically: "Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place." He talked of how he had seen the Promised Land, even though "I may not get there with you."



    Dr. Pausch’s lecture, in the same way, became a call to his colleagues and students to go on without him and do great things. But he was also addressing those closer to his heart.



    Near the end of his talk, he had a cake brought out for his wife, whose birthday was the day before. As she cried and they embraced on stage, the audience sang "Happy Birthday," many wiping away their own tears.



    Dr. Pausch’s speech was taped so his children, ages 5, 2 and 1, can watch it when they’re older. His last words in his last lecture were simple: "This was for my kids." Then those of us in the audience rose for one last standing ovation.

 

This seems to afflict a large number of people......

The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.

P. B. Medawar

British (Brazilian-born) anatomist (1915 - )

 

Half of All Web Viewers Watching What The Other Half Has To Say

According to the just released Deloitte's study on Media & Entertainment practice, looking at how American consumers between 13 and 75 years of age are using media and technology today, Millennials (13-24) are leading the way, embracing new technologies, games, entertainment platforms, user-generated content and communication tools. Data from the survey show that user-generated content is in tremendous demand across the generations, with 51% of all consumers watching and/or reading content created by others

This leads David Weinberger on his Joho the Blog: to ask the fair question:



"Now that we're in the majority, could you please stop calling us consumers?"

10 Future Web Trends

as covered in Read/WriteWeb

provides us with a glimpse of what is coming down the pike and it sure sounds exciting. I've stated many times before that on the web "we ain't seen nothing yet" and reading these ten trends confirms this. It's going to be exciting to watch which existing companies will take advantage of these new innovations and introduce successful new services based on them and what new ventures are going to appear on the scene. Can only say, stay tuned!

5000 Web Apps in 333 seconds.....

introduced by SimpleSpark



Whatever your take is on web 2.0 as a term, it's amazing what's happening with all the new applications being introduced and how many will change the way we interact and communicate on the web.

Web 3.0 or the Intelligent Web

as defined here by Eric Schmidt, Google, CEO is just around the corner, with implications that we can't quite comprehend today, but it potentially will be a bigger jump than what's today described as web 2.0

Embedded Video

Credit Kevin at Travolution for bringing it up first.

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Between Web 2.0 and a Common Sense Web

By Joe Buhler, Chief Strategist, L9.com

The shelves are full of books about new and potentially revolutionary changes in the web that are transforming the global marketplace. Welcome to a new world where top down hierarchies no longer apply or are constantly being undercut and where one-way “push” marketing communication is being replaced by the “pull” of mass collaboration and peer production. Every organization must cope with these new realities in the competitive arena today and come to grips with what these changes mean to the survivability of their business.

In 1999, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, envisioned this as the coming Semantic Web, when he said:

“I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize”.

As idealized, the Semantic Web, or Common Sense Web, involves the use of software agents to collect natural language information from disparate sources throughout the web and then put those elements together in various ways for people to use that information more effectively and extract greater meaning from it. In Web 2.0 we have seen both the advent and the proliferation of such agents, as web applications or widgets, as well as with specialized compilations or aggregations called “mashups”.

The actual situation on the web is a far cry from the ideal that Berners-Lee envisioned, but at this point it seems reasonable to assume we will get there sooner rather than later. The take-away messages for businesses are: (1) If you are already using the web, redouble your commitment and plan on investing more of your time and energy to make the web a central element of your business strategy going forward; (2) If you are not using the web yet or not very much at all, you really must get up on the curve as quickly as possible and make up for lost time as your business is likely at stake.

“The Long Tail” and “Wikinomics” are just two in a growing list of terms - and book titles - that try to explain and interpret what is today given the overall term - web 2.0 - where customers become “prosumers” and “crowd sourcing” or “collective intelligence” are terms thrown out along with “social networking” and “user generated content”.

What to make of it all? Tuning out is not a viable option and if you thought you were falling behind or cannot cope with these rapid developments, well there is news for you - we ain’t seen nothing yet! Nobody has really given a definite and defining label to what is already coming onto the scene. We will probably tire of the numbers game and not call this next phase web 3.0, although that is the term used in a recent New York Times article. Its title “Entrepreneurs see a web guided by common sense” is well suited. The need to make sense out of chaos is the underlying driver. Yes, wouldn’t it be great for the future web to seem like common sense -- what we the users understand and want the experience online to be? It will probably turn out that way but a lot of the process in getting there will actually be chaotic.

We certainly aren’t there yet, but it helps to understand where in terms of capabilities and development the web is today. Using the world of telecommunications as an analogy we are at a similar stage we were when the only tool available was a black rotary dial phone, which only those of us who are closer to retirement than graduation still remember being used at all.

What we will see in the next phase of the web - the next net - is that mining human intelligence will allow a layer of meaning to be built on top of the mass of collective intelligence now being gathered and spread daily. Today’s web is constantly being improved by the actions of millions of individuals who not only provide their commentary and opinions on any and all subjects but also increasingly develop their own software or “widgets” that adorn social networking sites such as MySpace or YouTube. Our interactions with the web help to actually make it better and easier to use. Many of today’s mashups interact with and combine information to provide dynamically generated applications to improve results. These self-directed tools are used for instance in vacation planning, to manage personal schedules or even entire business projects.

As the definition on Wikipedia shows, there is no consensus on how this latest iteration of the web will exactly look like but it is equally clear that further significant improvements will happen. Using the new collaboration and communications capabilities available to everyone today they will happen faster and with the involvement of the community at large, rather than in a closed development environment.

It’s been said that web 2.0 is actually what happened while we were waiting for the semantic web to appear. The more we see the emergence of these evolved tools it becomes obvious that there is a lot of truth in that statement. It is certainly not too far fetched to expect the near future to bring us completely personalized websites that are dynamically tailored to each users interest based on software tools that observe, collect, analyze and then correctly interpret the intelligence gathered from our online behavior.

Made in China: Swiss army knife suffers an identity crisis

The Guardian reports.

 
This is an off-topic post but as a Swiss - although not of the flag waving patriotic kind, after having lived 37 years outside the country - this article caught my eye. What's the world coming to, if this should happen, I don't know but it's not a fun thought. Is nothing sacred anymore??

P.S. to Robin Williams: The corkscrew is the most important tool of a Swiss Army Knife! How else do you think the Swiss could celebrate victory with some good drop?

The World of the Internet

is a very informative and also surprising map showing internet usage figures across the globe.
When we consider some of the participation rates it seems evident that future growth is a reality, especially in countries like China and India.

Web 3.0: You say you’re on an infolution? Well, you know…

is an excellent commentary in Information Architects Japan » iA Notebook »
on the essence of the web and where it is headed. Oliver is right on in his assessment, which I share.

In Part 2 he presents some thought provoking stuff, not only about the web but democracy and politics at large.

Great read.

Keen vs. Weinberger: The Plot (by Amateurs) Against America

Here's a comment by John Biggs of CrunchGear

I can only wish I was able to write in as witty a style as he does and oh, yeah as a bonus he also throws in a punch at Murdoch!

Why is this man smiling?

I was on my way to the outhouse with some print-outs of the WSJ opinion page — the newsprint version is too harsh — when I noticed an interview between Andrew Keen, writer of The Cult of the Amateur, and David Weinberger, author of Everything is Miscellaneous.

Mr. Keen’s argument runs in the cranky old man watching Elvis on Ed Sullivan vein. He believes blogging and all this Web 2.0 razamatazz is a bunch of Commie hoo-ha and in his day you used to have to go to the library to look up the long-winded ramblings of an accredited critic, scientist, or guy-who-writes-encylopediast to get information on a topic, not some hoopty-doopty hippity hoppity kid out in Kansas with a keyboard and some moxie, by gum, whose only interests include letting dogs pee on Mr. Keen’s lawn and preventing him from getting a good night’s sleep thanks to all the Web 2.0 bordello parties they’re having down the street. Mr. Weinberger thinks Web 2.0 is cool.

Watch the sparks fly as these two UFC-certified intellectuals spar on Murdoch’s future dumping ground. Roar!

The Web in 1994

Found this on John Battelle's Searchblog sounds so quaint looking at it now and it seems like it was eons ago since the web first appeared on our radar.
Who still remembers Digital or the first Mosaic browser? Amazing what's happened since!

More CEOs Openly Post

reports the Journal in  Executives Get the Blogging Bug and it shows that one more web innovation has finally made it into the mainstream and like others before is still misunderstood by many who now seem to consider it the thing to do. I remember ten years ago, when every CEO under the sun suddenly cried "what's this new thing, a website, build me one of these!". Now, it's "get me blog" and most efforts are quite lame.

It's not that these people can't write but the system mostly prevents them from telling anything new or in some cases even telling the truth. Everything seems to be run past the legal department and the end result is just more corporate communications spin. OK, maybe I'm a bit harsh here, but I haven't found a compelling CEO blog yet.

I doubt the majority of blog readers will find those executive suit blogs a compelling read for the very reasons I've just outlined above. If you're prevented by corporate rules and behavior from telling the truth or reveal anything new and exciting or controversial, what's the point?

Despite these considerations, my guess is that the types of CEO blogs will proliferate and who knows, maybe down the road might even become more interesting and useful as these authors realize that participating in the conversation about their organizations that is taking place anyway, is time well spent and as a key benefit, maybe they might even learn something, provided they start to listen.

More CEOs Openly Post

reports the Journal in  Executives Get the Blogging Bug and it shows that one more web innovation has finally made it into the mainstream and like others before is still misunderstood by many who now seem to consider it the thing to do. I remember ten years ago, when every CEO under the sun suddenly cried "what's this new thing, a website, build me one of these!". Now, it's "get me blog" and most efforts are quite lame.

It's not that these people can't write but the system mostly prevents them from telling anything new or in some cases even telling the truth. Everything seems to be run past the legal department and the end result is just more corporate communications spin. OK, maybe I'm a bit harsh here, but I haven't found a compelling CEO blog yet.

I doubt the majority of blog readers will find those executive suit blogs a compelling read for the very reasons I've just outlined above. If you're prevented by corporate rules and behavior from telling the truth or reveal anything new and exciting or controversial, what's the point?

Despite these considerations, my guess is that the types of CEO blogs will proliferate and who knows, maybe down the road might even become more interesting and useful as these authors realize that participating in the conversation about their organizations that is taking place anyway, is time well spent and as a key benefit, maybe they might even learn something, provided they start to listen.

This is a new web tool that you might want to check out!

You can read a brief description of what it does right inside this box:

For all presenters out there......

Travolution Blog: Powerpoint will kill you in the end......

The juxtaposition

presented by the my two recent posts on web 2.0 and reading a comment on Doc Searls' weblog, made me realize how appropriate this quote by William Gibson is:

"The future is already here — it is just unevenly distributed".

Think about it!

Study finds weak participation on Web 2.0 sites

as reported by Tech News on ZDNet. It looks like not everyone is out there writing or uploading away with utter abandon!

More like reading and viewing what others provide. It's a clear sign that despite all the coverage web 2.0 has been getting for some time now, the vast audience out there has not yet caught on despite being crowned "Persons of the Year" by TIME Magazine in 2006.

There are no separate statistics on the travel sector but I'd venture a guess that the participation rates are probably higher than for the general audience reported here. Travel and tourism is not only the largest vertical online with the highest sales figures but is also a subject a huge number of people are participating in and are rather passionate about. While not everyone is going to upload their vacation photos on Flickr, many write reviews and comments about their trips.

This should produce higher percentages of participations in travel, however, it will take a while until it becomes a mainstream activity everyone engages in, if it ever will. Having said that, the implications on business are still considerable and can't be ignored.

Beyond Web 2.0 - The New Reality or from Customer-Focus to Customer Control

It's been said the web changes everything - and it certainly has.

How information is spread, how it is consumed, how it is exchanged. Web 2.0 has become a fashionable term in the short period of about two years since it was introduced. Social networking, wikis, tags, tag clouds, mashups, podcasts, blogs, user generated content, are just a few of the many new buzz words and expressions in our ever expanding web lexicon. The subject of this article, however, is not so much about definitions but about the effect Web 2.0 has on us - and in terms of business - on our customers. Companies like MySpace, Facebook and YouTube are representative of the new ways people are choosing to communicate and consume and more importantly, produce media. Media consumption has transformed and moved online at a staggering pace. A whole new generation has already grown up with the web as their main source of news and entertainment, and their primary educational and communication tool. Children growing up now will know nothing pre-web. A new term, information snacking has been coined which defines the intensive habit of consuming in ever smaller portions or snippets, compared to sitting down and casually reading a newspaper for an hour or more at a time.

When Web 2.0 came and passed, so to speak, it did so without any clear definition. But the web was changing rapidly and people apply names to things as a way to understand them. In this case it seemed to include all kinds of stuff of differing nature – meaning the web was changing in different ways simultaneously and a lot of those different things got clumped together under the misleading Web 2.0 label. There were big changes taking place in social networking – people talking to each other rather than just taking information down from web servers. On a slightly more subtle level it was also about people changing information rather than just accessing it. Web interfaces were also getting dramatically better with improved immediacy and a term we will now employ, direct empowerment. If anything, empowerment is the key to the changes that have taken place and will continue to take place.

The editors of TIME - who last year selected "YOU" as person of the year, see the dawning of a new era resulting from “the small contributions of millions of people” -- “You seizing the reigns of global media founding and framing the new digital democracy.” Powering all of this is, of course, are “consumer-generated media”, “social media” and other Web 2.0 buzz words from the debate about the changing media landscape. But TIME’s selection elevates awareness of this trend from the hot story of the day to the scale of a full-fledged social movement. TIME has recognized a momentous social development relatively early in its life-cycle as they did with “The Under-25 Generation” (1966), and “American Women” (1975). Unlike those cultural phenomena, however, “You” is not limited to a demographic segment of the country, but it is open to everyone.

Is it all hype, or is it real?

As with any new development on the web, there is always a bit of both involved. The hype exists primarily on the level of many individual start-ups claiming to be the next Google in order to get funded with venture capital or acquired by Rupert Murdoch for a billion dollars! But the reality is seen in how people are actually using the web and what tools are becoming available at an ever more rapid pace. How will these changes further impact human interactions and communication and, therefore, business and especially marketing? It used to be about customer-focus, but in actuality it still very much a product driven marketplace to this day. Marketers have always had a strong desire for control. Control over the product, the packaging, and for the message and to be effective, to break through the clutter by segmenting and targeting. It's a military-like discipline with military-like terms. That world is changing, or has already changed. But often it seems organizations don't realize how profound the change has been.

At first, some businesses responded by incorporating social networking tools like blogs as a new corporate communications channels. Some even started their blogs without accepting comments, but have since corrected course. It was hard to let go of the old “We’re going to tell our customers more about us….” mindset of traditional marketing strategists. A handful of brands have attempted to use social media as a new tool to manipulate gullible consumers, creating fake blogs such as McDonalds’ Lincoln Fry blog or Wal-Mart’s “Wal-Marting Across America”, and more recently Sony’s “alliwantforxmasisapsp.com” blog. In each case though, these companies learned that the blogosphere is closely policed by zealous ethicists. Disingenuous marketing tactics are not tolerated long in the social network; they commonly backfire.

As this social movement gains momentum, businesses must learn new skills. This is a daunting prospect, but one filled with opportunity. It's really not specifically about having a CEO blog, marketing podcast or online newsletter. These may be useful and sometimes necessary tools but it's about much more than that. It's more fundamental. There is already too much clutter, too much information -- and adding to what many consider a cacophony of noise doesn't really contribute anything positive. Companies can no longer control their message. They can join the conversation or stay on the sidelines. It is now a conversation not only influenced, but directed by the customer.

The key concept for businesses to understand in this new environment is to listen to people’s voices, not their wallets. “Customer-centric marketing” has been a much talked about trend for a long time now. However, the advances in database marketing, predictive modeling, and lifetime value segmentation are really a “money-centric”, not “customer-centric” approaches. Tracking purchases focuses marketers on the next product to sell and pushing it at the customer, while neglecting the relationship the customer wants to have with the brand. The collective “You” is demanding that businesses listen to criticism and complaints and honestly admit mistakes. Organizations need to be open to suggestions and participate in a collaborative process to build their brand.

How 7 Basic Human Needs are Driving the New Social Web2.0

is the title of an excellent blog post in Influential Interactive Marketing. It touches on a number of key aspects in the fast changing web landscape described today in its many manifestations under the catch-all term of web 2.0.

As the hype surrounding it seems to peak, the inevitable evolution of technology is already moving in the direction of an ever more "common sense" web or the "semantic web" which involves the use of software agents to collect natural language information from disparate sources throughout the web and then puts those elements together in various ways for people to use that information more effectively and extract greater meaning from it.

Web 2.0 Expo

WebEx Connect seeks developers by ZDNet's Dan Farber --

Last year WebEx launched WebEx Connect, an on demand development platform for collaborative, composite (mashup) applications. At the Web 2.0 Expo, the company announced Connect Developer Network that includes tools, community resources and marketing programs for participants. WebEx claims that its distribution, integration and monetization platform will help to transform software "just as RSS, [...]