The word is out on the street: Web 2.0 is the next big thing! or is it Web 3.0? Needless to say, Web something point 'oh' is up to bat and sure to hit a home run.
In the past few years weve seen the proliferation of what is called in the common parlance 'Web 2.0' sites, that is a somewhat ambiguous catch phrase for web sites that rely on user participation for content. The business model works thusly: build the infrastructure, the happy end users arrive, and sell ads to your hearts content. YouTube and many more loosely follow this model.
At first it seemed like a great idea. Build superior functionality and you're in the money, 'people will actually add content for you!' so said the experts... and sure enough the rabbits reproduced like crazy and now weve got Web 2.0 sites that cater to just about everything. "Welcome to the New Hampshire Social Network of Kundalini Yoga Practitioners" : please enter in all your friends and relatives names at once!
So what relevance does this have for the average JoshuaZeidner.com reader? The fact is that we currently have an enormous bloat of these 'media service' companies, few of which offer any substantial service to the average user. Their user agreements include all sorts of thorny offensive legal tactics that the average Joe completely overlooks such as signing away all copyright to all submitted works. Right now what were seeing is a bit more sophistication in attitudes towards these kinds of sites, for instance Wikipedia. So the creamier of the crop of potential submitters are migrating away from these 'user communties' and we're left with the passive end users who never really submit anything of value beyond videos of their cat chasing a vacuum cleaner. The inevitable moral to that story is that all interesting content will wash out by the next lunar cycle. In this case content will be taking precedence over medium for the time being. As a blogger or content producer of some kind, its a sellers market.
So, back to the title of this post: Night of the Living Marketing Blogs. Anyone who has spent a substantial amount of time on the net has no doubt noticed the plethora of blogs and social networks dedicated to, you guessed it: blogging and social networking! And this says a few things, most importantly that these technologies are beneficial to the owners, not the users. These marketing people are giddy about social networking not because its going to save humanity, but the potential to gain marketing information on these social networks is unprecendented. That is of course, if everyone plays along nicely. And given the short history of Wikipedia I would wager that this is not the way things will progress. So lets just say: thats a big 'if'. The kind of 'if' that bespeaks of every utopian project in human history.
So here, standing just west of Tower of Babel 2.0 a new discipline is likely to arise: Web 2.0 analysis. Most of what is being said about these brands of sites amounts to boosterism and stock churning (ala TechCrunch.com). What is lacking is real hard-core analysis of these sites for people who are curious about them and perhaps rely on them for their business. Stay tuned for a closer look at popular Web 2.0 sites aimed at power users.
Wikipedia Watch
Facebook Watch
Web 2.0, do the Numbers Add Up?
a Blog Post: Thoughts on Measuring User Generated Content
Monday, March 3, 2008
Night of the Living Marketing Blogs: a closer look at Web x.0
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1 comments:
Hi Josh,
I enjoyed reading your post, and thanks for including the link to my post on Measuring User Generated Content.
I have to say, that yes, the trend is to commercialize free and useful resources on the Internet until they become completely uselessly cluttered with manipulative and untargeted spam. But, there are powerful forces within the user community that keep adapting to allow greater leaps in information sharing, socializing and resource pooling. The successful communities are those that develop "community standards" that encourage the participants to match their content to the needs and expectations of the audience.
Even the big corporations (well, a few of them), are learning that thinly disguised sales pitches do not constitute valuable content in most communities.
Of course, measuring "value" is still in its infancy. But I have always said to my clients, "Don´t ask me to tell you what your customers want. My job is to help you let them tell you what they want." And we are developing more and more sophisticated ways of letting our communities tell us what they want loud and clear. People have choices as to where they will go to get content. They WILL follow valuable content where it proliferates. We just need to develop the tools to listen.
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