Web 2.0

Defining social media & web2.0

Defining Social Media & Web2.0

The diagram (click it for a readable version) above is one I put together a while ago to try and explain what I think the terms social media and web2.0 actually mean, and how the two relate to one another. They are often used interchangably, but I don’t think that it necessarily is the case that they are synonymous.

Social media for me is media made social. That might be obvious, but you have to think what you mean by media. Text is media, photos are media, video is media. Maybe a web bookmarkcan be media, and a presentation file too. How we make that media social is by making it commentable, sharable, editable, embdeddable. By allowing others to interact with the media, we have made it social.

Web2.0, for me, is the means by which we make our media social. The blog make text social, as do wikis. Flickr makes photos social, YouTube does the same for video, and so on. The infrastructure used to enable this is stuff like tagging, RSS, AJAX, mashups and widgets.

I think just about every web2.0 service can be described in this way: Google Docs is word processing and spreadsheets made social, for example. The interesting bit is when it all works well, and that’s the ovallybit in the middle of my diagram – enhanced communication and collaborative, which at its zenith becomes community.

How do you define web2.0 and social media? Does it fit in with mydiagram? Feel free to borrow it, edit it and reuse it.

Planning trips, 2.0

We’re off for a trip next week, to Cornwall for a few days. There may well be some light blogging ahead. Anyway, we are trying to cram in as much stuff as we can, and make the best use of our membership of both English Heritage and the National Trust.

(It’s always done my head in that there needs to be two different organisations to manage heritage properties in the UK, but I am sure there is a good reason for it. Probably.)

Anyway, there are a number of things that are quite important to consider when planning what we are seeing when, for example: the distance between places, the distance back to where we are staying, how long each journey will take, how long we might want to stay in one place for.To get this done, we had to:

  • Look in the two different handbooks to see what places we might like to visit
  • Check the map to see if they were near each other
  • Use Google Maps to work out distances and times
  • Record it all on a spreadsheet

This is a pain in the arse. Fair enough, you don’t want to plan these things too much, else it stops being fun, but some idea of an itinerary is probably a good thing if you want to make the best use of your time.

I did think, though, that it would be easier if we had a Google Maps mashup, linked to a database containing the postcodes of EH, NT and other touristy type attractions, where you could build a route for each day, maybe the system could even suggest stuff that’s close by.

I’m sure this wouldn’t be so hard to do, if you had the information available. As David Wilcox reported, EH are starting to do stuff in the social networking space, albeit focusing on volunteers etc rather than visitors (I think). Having quickly Googled, I couldn’t find any kind of online community for people interested in these kinds of places, not even a forum. OK, so I didn’t look very hard, but this is pretty surprising.

There’s opportunities everywhere.

Trust in Web 2.0

Danah Boyd writes a post about a rather worrying occurence: a friend who had their Google account taken away from them:

Earlier this week, an acquaintance of mine found himself trapped in a Kafka-esque nightmare, a nightmare that should make all of us stop and think. He wants to remain anonymous so let’s call him Bob. Bob was an early adopter of all things Google. His account was linked to all sorts of Google services. Gmail was the most important thing to him – he’d been using it for four years and all of his email (a.k.a. “his life”) was there. Bob also managed a large community in Orkut, used Google’s calendaring service, and had accounts on many of of their different properties.

Earlier this week, Bob received a notice that there was a spam problem in his Orkut community. The message was in English and it looked legitimate and so he clicked on it. He didn’t realize that he’d fallen into a phisher’s net until it was too late. His account was hijacked for god-knows-what-purposes until his account was blocked and deleted. He contacted Google’s customer service and their response basically boiled down to “that sucks, we can’t restore anything, sign up for a new account.” Boom! No more email, no more calendar, no more Orkut, no more gChat history, no more Blogger, no more anything connected to his Google account.

Maybe no-one should rely on just one company to do everything for them. I really only rely on Google for my email, but even if just that disappeared, I’d be seriously pissed off. Again, this is one of the anti-web2.0 arguments: relying on these third party services is all well and good, but what happens when something goes wrong? How can we trust these people with our data, our information, our identities?

This week saw some outage on Amazon’s S3 and EC3 services. Many people might think of Amazon as just a supplier of books and CDs, and a whole lot of other stuff. But they also offer services for people who run websites, hosting and that sort of thing. It’s used by an awful lot of Web 2.0 startups, because it means they don’t have to even buy a server to start a company – let Amazon handle the headaches for a monthly fee.

But when this giant back-end, if you’ll excuse the unpleasant image, goes down, what’s left? For those of us that are trying to sell the web 2.0 and social media dream, what’s left is potentially a face covered in egg. We need to have confidence that the ideas and approaches we want people to take up are going to work 99.999999r% of the time. Especially when we are talking government, and public services, where stuff really has to work (though to be fair it often doesn’t).

Two point oh? Or zero?

The BBC are coming up with guidance on how staff should pronounce the phrase “Web 2.0”. Is it, for example:

  • Web two point oh
  • Web two point zero
  • Web two dot oh
  • Web two
  • etc etc etc…

I have always been a two point oh kinda guy myself, which puts me in line with most folk. I do think there is a nice simplicity to just web two,  but it misses the essential nerdiness of the extra version number, redundant as it may be.

What’s your preferred pronunciation?

Feedable

 

Feedable

Feedable is a nice online news aggregator. As well as having your own feeds, it also provides information on hot topics of conversation in a variety of subjects.

Thanks to Steve Rubel for pointing it out.

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