Digital Insanity Magazine by Bruno Amaral

There is no such thing as a Web 2.0

Fri, 08 Oct 2010 12:37:34 +0000

“In less than five years, a movement has taken hold that is having a profound effect on public relations. Called Web 2.0 by Tim O’Reilly, of O’Reilly Media in 2003, it heralds the evolution of the web from a repository of information and communication technologies into a space for symmetrical communication; a platform which aids the transfer of knowledge and conversations and a place where people can easily mix and match both.”

David Phillips e Philip Young em “Online Public Relations — A Practical Guide to Developing an Online Strategy in the World of Social Media”

The idea of a Web 2.0 was widely adopted after O’Reilly made it evident that there were changes that could not be ignored and that allowed for more people to use the internet to communicate and to collaborate. These changes were in fact the result of a tipping point in usability, in a growing concern to make the web more accessible to those without programming skills. We can’t even determine what caused this tipping point, as it appears to have been a set of factors: Companies became more aware of usability requirements, the number of internet users was growing more and more each day, publishing online content became easier thanks to blogging services and software developers saw great improvements in both programming languages and web servers.

When we talk about web 2.0 we are simply mentioning a point of evolution, characterized by real time communication and a growing interaction between people, groups and organizations. It is in no way “a new internet”, and by it’s own it is not a paradigm shift.

As if this wasn’t enough, in an interview for an IBM podcast, Tim Berners-Lee showed an interesting perspective regarding the hype surrounding Web 2.0.

Sometimes we even refer to it as the “social web”, which leads us to another fallacy. The web as always been social in nature, it was always meant to assist cooperation between people, to spread information and to allow for low cost and high efficiency tools of communication to be developed. Before 2003, when Web 2.0 was proclaimed, groups were already forming through mailing lists, online forums, Chat Rooms and Instant Messaging services.

Web 2.0 is bandied about by a lot of people as being new. It is really an evolution.

David Phillips e Philip Young

Fighting the Hype, first steps

Thu, 07 Oct 2010 08:07:23 +0000

The last few posts make up an introduction to online communication. In very broad strokes they attempt to give you an idea on how I think about the Internet.

Despite the lack of references, I feel it is easy to see it is influenced by the Cluetrain Manifesto, David Weinberger, Clay Shirky’s book “Here Comes Everybody”, David Phillips, Philip Young as well as a number of friends and bloggers whose work I follow.

Next up, we prove that Web 2.0 does not exist.

New Ways To Communicate

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 08:00:21 +0000

The Internet is not just content, it is also populated by a myriad of ways to communicate. Communication on the Internet is no longer the exchange of emails, publishing and reading html pages.

We have been using the term “social media” to describe the channels of online communication that somehow level the playing field between people and organizations. In fact, social media channels allow for publics to form with relative ease and gives them the ability to communicate in real time at a very low cost. It is therefore no surprise that these publics are able to organize and act to influence an organization or a government institution.

These organizations then face a new challenge, they must monitor the online dialogue and obtain permission to participate in that dialogue. But it is not only a matter of monitoring, it is also a matter of choosing in which channels it is important to participate. It is not just a matter of which channels are the most used, it is also important to identify the ones were the most engaged publics communicate.

But “social media” is also a term used to describe that same online dialogue. In that aspect, it is important to listen and to infer the values and values system to which an organization must adhere to or at least understand to build a middle ground.

Publish First, Filter later

Tue, 05 Oct 2010 08:00:49 +0000

To solve the puzzle presented by the excess of information we adopted a series of mechanisms to gather and organize online content.

Search Engines were one of the first tools used, they index all the information and content they can find, to later gather it based on our search term and organize it by hierarchy according to both relevance and the website’s credibility which in turn is set by a private algorithm.

Useful as they may be, search engines are not a magic solution. Digg and Delicious are a different approach to solving the same problem: they both allow users to gather and organize information as they see fit.

However, the excess of information is not just a problem in organizing and filtering information, it also poses a problem regarding the maintenance and quality of that information. Wikis are one way to keep information accurate, allowing users to take charge and giving them a simple way to correct imprecisions and omissions.

All and all, we have moved from a single solution where large search engines presented the information we searched for, to a more diversified option where groups os users do their best to keep information organized and accurate. Each of these solutions as its shortcomings, but together they seem to be working well enough.

The idea of “publish, then filter” comes from Clay Shirky in the book “Here Comes Everybody”.

The Excess of Information

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 09:50:18 +0000

If we publish a document on the Web, it is immediately at the reach of millions of people with Internet access. The document can be an HTML page, a personal profile, a blog comment, an audio or a video file. We can look at all our online activity as publishing and sharing information.

Before the Internet, knowledge and information was limited to books, recordings, and encyclopedias. Today, information is distributed without restrictions. If on one hand this means that the Internet is the biggest and most accessible source of information, on the other it causes a problem regarding the quality of that information.

The speed at which we publish information on the web makes it impossible to catalogue content, to assure the veracity and accuracy of information much less the credibility of a great deal of sources of information.

To organizations this translates into an enforced transparency and a new management task, that of monitoring the online discourse and acting to preserve reputation as best as possible.

“The power of tags shows that the way to manage information overload is more information. That’s what the doomsayers of the 90’s — Information Anxiety! Information Tidal Wave! — didn’t foresee.”
<p>
  <a href="https://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/">David Weinberger</a>, Co-Autor do “Cluetrain Manifesto”; Autor de “Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder”
</p>

Intro – The Internet

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 19:03:15 +0000

It is wrong to think about the Internet as a platform or a mass media channel. What began as a project from the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) came to be much more than network between machines. The goal was to use current infrastructures to access military databases in disperse locations. Thanks to the way it was designed, the Internet can now be used for a multitude of porpuses, of which viewing webpages and exchanging emails are just two of the oldest examples.

“(…) I did not forsee the powerful side of the internet community and its impact in every aspect of our society. My initial vision was for the network to allow for machine-to-machine or person-to-machine interaction but it’s main use is now the person-to-person interaction.”

Leonard Kleinrock in an interview to SIC Television

In time the Internet evolved and was used in universities and later became available to the public. With this growth we also saw an increase in ways we can interact, with each other and with machines. Content is now passed on to others at much greater speeds and be accessed through a vast number of platforms (computers, mobile phones, netbooks and even game consoles). Most of all, it is meant so that anyone can both access and publish content for everyone thus allowing for a number of interactions, from personal phone calls and messages to group forming and mass collaboration.

What we call the Internet is in fact a set of communication technologies that are made to interact with each other and allow for a rich and interactive communication. The most visible part of the Internet is the Web, a network of hyperlinked documents to which we are beginning to add a myriad of other features and possibilities of interaction thanks to the use of databases, dynamic programming languages such as PHP, Ruby and several others, and of course, HTML5. This means that today the web is not only made of documents, but also software applications.

Fighting the Hype

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 16:05:16 +0000

Over the next few weeks I will be publishing a small series of articles, most of which are the translation to english of previous writings.

The point of these articles is to bring down popular concepts such as “Web 2.0”, “Social Media”, “Social Web”, “Social Networks” and a number of others. These concepts tend to be misunderstood and misused, as a result Communication Professionals are faced with unrealistic expectations about what they do, how the tools they use work and what results are to be achieved.

Simply put, just because a word is used often it does not mean it is always given the same meaning or even understood.

First we will look a bit at the evolution of the Internet, and then we will pick up the concepts one by one.