Web 2.0, not just for techies anymore

I'm currently working on a marketing plan for a construction industry professional organization. The group is well known and respected, but they want to expand a bit, and freshen up their value proposition. All pretty standard stuff.

Going into this, I have to say, I had some preconceived notions. I thought these construction company owners were going to be "good 'ol boys" who barely used computers and made comments like "Oh the Internet, yah, my son showed it to me one time on his computer."

Boy was I wrong. The construction industry is very online, and very technically sophisticated. It's international 24x7 business with a Blackberry and a laptop on all the time.

The managers I'm working with live their lives online, as much as any technology workers I know. In fact, one of the members just said to me, "We need to do a survey of the blogs and forums on this topic... really get some insight on current perceptions and what’s valued. You know, that's the best way to find out what people really think, just see what they are blogging about...the language in these is more first hand and unfiltered compared with other published information."

I'm delighted to say, I stand corrected. This should be a very interesting project.

i've got too, much, time on my hands.....

Please sing blog post title to the appropriate tune to get into the mood to view...

This! Venn diagram madness! You can click on the image to see the whole thing on the Valleywag site.




It's actually pretty clever, but really, umm, who'd take the time to do that? I do have to say, I love Valleywag.

Interview with the creator of "that wonderful web 2.0 video"...

John Battelle of SearchBlog was fortunate enough to interview the creator, Michael Wesch. It's a great interview... what an interesting person! You'll recall the video posted by fellow maven ryin.

Read the interview.

Dell Wastes No Time

Barely two weeks after Michael Dell stepped back into the CEO role, Dell has launched Dell Idea Storm. It's a Digg-like website for customers to suggest and vote on ideas for upcoming Dell systems. Not surprisingly, the top suggestion is to have a Dell machine without all the crapware from AOL, McAfee, Google, etc. Customers just want the computer with the OS installed. Shocking.

Part of my reason for switching to a Mac last year was because I didn't want to invest to time to do a clean install of Windows XP. By buying a PowerBook (and later MacBook), I got a machine that was not infested and bloated with software I didn't want and would never use.

Anyway, Idea Storm is brilliant. Dell gets in touch with its customers, allowing them to suggest and vote on upcoming features. Asking your customers what they want - why don't other hardware manufacturers do this? Then we might actually get a laptop whose battery life doesn't degrade to an hour after 6 month's use.

Are you ready for DST?

DST, in case you didn't know, is Daylight Savings Time. It's coming early this year, and it's bigger than you think. I wonder, when they were touting the savings, did the calculate the cost?

I've been hollering (politely, of course) about this at my own university since late last week after dozens of messages from separate sys-admins trickled and then poured in over the last few days, and we set up a web page to gather all our information. I asked for someone to coordinate on the technical side of the house. As I said to my boss on Friday,

This is one of those, "I've been doing this for ten years and something isn't hitting the right note," things. It's a big impact, there are a lot of patches that will have to happen, and it doesn't feel like anyone has their arms around the whole situation.

Sometimes we see things happening where all we can do is raise a flag and make sure that everyone knows what's going on. If no other actions on their part are required, them I'm fine with it, but I want them to say it. At the very least, I would like us to check in with them and make sure there's some common dialog happening.

I'm sorry I can't explain it in more objective terms. It's a gut thing based on how the whole thing has evolved.

Later on, I explained again more succinctly:

Basically, I see the potential for trouble, and I want someone technical to make sure there isn't any trouble or to say that it's all under control. Trouble could be anything from it doesn't go well to it's extremely uncoordinated and a lot more work that it has to be.

She trusts my gut and we have someone on the technical side. It's validating to read this post in CIO.com titled Y2K Redux from February 12. I used this same example with the work folks on Friday. (Yes, I'm feeling smart today.)

CIO.com is, by the way, a valuable bit of reading for non-CIOs. If you want to become knowledgeable about the business of IT, read it. TWs have constant angst about staying valuable: understand the business you're in and what issues your bosses are dealing with.

Does community have real value?

The Harvard Business Review recently (Nov 2006) ran an article that attempted to quantify the value of eBay's online communities.

This is what they did: they performed a yearlong experiment on the German site that involved present eBay customers who had all bought and/or sold in the last three months but had not participated in the communities. The experimenters incentivized the eBay users to try out the communities with promises of iPod drawings and other prizes.

Within three months, 3,299 of the invitees become active community participants (out of 79,242) and not to our surprise, these participants REALLY got into eBay in a way they never had before.


According to the experimenters, the German site "earned several million dollars in profit from the increased trading behavior from the experiment" and they summed up the project by saying, "Our results show that customer communities pay off handsomely for eBay and suggest any online company will benefit from nurturing its communities."

Mmmm, so juicy.... yet so... obvious!

You can read the complete report (it's short) by visiting the site and agreeing to watch a short web-vertisement ala salon.com.

off topic - are dot.com days here again? silly company ideas....

I just got an email about a new service in the Bay Area - called "flylite.com." These guys are calling themselves a "remote wardrobe manager" - basically they send and store your packed suitcase so you can travel luggage free. They also dry clean everything between trips. Wow! Suitcase storage and dry cleaning in one service! What a fabulous idea! And I'm relieved of the burden of having my clothes in my own home! Sadly, their crummy all-flash site (I guess being found on search engines wasn't part of their biz plan) doesn't load in IE or Firefox - so umm, so they might want to look into that part of their "service."

According to the email - each trip will set you back $100/$200 and the company is looking for investors. I find this whole idea ridiculous. I mean, can you really not pack your own suitcase?

Video: Evolution of Web 2.0

Michael Wesch, an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Kansas State University, offers this thought-provoking video about the evolution and meaning of Web 2.0.

Besides the energizing background music, the video also contains this pithy definition:

Web 2.0 is linking people ...
... people sharing, trading, and collaborating ...

Wesch also highlights ideas such as tagging that provide semantic meaning to documents, photos, and videos. Finally, Wesch emphasizes the importance of xml in facilitating the automated exchange of data. The video is worth a few minutes of your time.

Let's Get Web 101 Right First

You know, before everyone goes jumping over to "Web 2.0," I'd suggest getting some basics right, like making sure you know how to set the field focus. I mean really, is it too much to ask a programmer to put my cursor in the right place, when the entire purpose of the login form is for me to enter information? C'mon, people.

The Statesman form above is just one of a ridiculous number of examples of usability violations in web applications. Call me crazy, but when I work on usability for an application, this is one of the first things I look at. I'm keyboard driven. When you tell me I have to enter information on the next page, I'm ready to type. Do they not teach this stuff?