ACTUAL TALK
Hi. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Stuart Langridge, and I've been asked to come today and talk to you about, basically, cool new things on the internet. You've doubtless heard of all these things (big slide with words): rss, weblogs, myspace, youtube, wikis. Anyone not heard of any of these things? Anyone got a myspace? Got a livejournal?
What I plan to do here is a whistlestop tour through a load of these things, so when people like me from IT drop them into the conversation or when Managing Partner Magazine does a feature, you'll already know what it all means, and then we'll talk about what, if anything, all these exciting whizzy new technologies mean for marketing and for M&R. There's space at the end for questions, but this isn't a lecture, so if you have questions shout out during the talk, I don't mind!
So I'm going to talk about ten cool things. They are:
weblogs
rss
social networks
myspace and livejournal
forums
youtube
google maps
wikis
wikipedia
codes of conduct
Weblogs are an online journal, basically. However, saying that that's it is like saying that the Taj Mahal is an arrangement of bricks; it's true, but it doesn't really encompass the totality of the thing. What's made the idea of keeping a chatty diary on the internet popular is that writing a weblog goes hand-in-hand with the idea of the stuff you write being fairly unsanitised. It's supposed to be a relatively personal thing, which is what makes them interesting to read, and they take both the good with the bad. A few misguided companies haven't understood this, and they've done what they call a "weblog" which is actually just a series of press releases; it lacks personality, and people ignore it. There's already a mechanism for press releases. I'm going to talk more about this later.
RSS is a term that comes up a lot. Basically, an RSS "feed" is a machine-readable version of a weblog. It's useful because you, the reader, can then go and get a thing called an RSS reader, or RSS aggregator. You then tell your RSS reader which weblogs and websites you want to read, and it goes away and collects the new articles from them and presents them to you all in one place, like your own personal newspaper. RSS in itself isn't very exciting -- well, actually that's a lie, RSS itself is about as exciting as having a hole drilled in the side of your head, unless you're someone like me -- but the idea that it embodies, that you, the reader, can build your own private newspaper of the stuff you want to read without having to go and read it in different places yourself, is a powerful one. Imagine, for example, that you liked the film reviews and the restaurant reviews in the Metro, but you like to read actual news reporting from the Guardian. You need to go and get both papers; walk off to the railway station to get your free Metro, and then go to the newsagents to get the Guardian. RSS lets you grab just the stuff you're interested in from lots of different sources, and the computer takes care of actually grabbing it for you. When people talk about RSS being cool, they're talking about the sorts of things it makes possible, not about the technology itself. We're looking to do this with the firm's intranet over the next 12 months or so, so the intranet front page basically becomes a collection of the stuff that you're interested in reading.
Social networks are, basically, an attempt to take the networking skills you have and replace you with a computer. Whether they're successful or not is somewhat open to debate. What they're trying to do is enable people to talk and share things and collaborate, even if they're not in the same place; it's about building up communities of shared interest. One good example of this is myspace.
NOTES
Ten cool things
weblogs
weblogs from real people doing the work, not sanitised
rss for syndication
community & social networking
friends reunited
myspace
number of users
bands replace url
livejournal
build a community
no marketing communications
weblogs from real people doing the work, not sanitised
linkedin
more traditional style business contacts, but on the web
trying to replace with tech what marketing do with contacts
forums
most popular forums are ones where people are really interested
Gaia Online, forum for Japanese cartoon animation discussion, has 7m users, 1,000 million posts
doesn't work so well for people trying to use them for work, but trying
openwetware
del.icio.us?
youtube
huge growth
sharing of video
tagging (is there tagging?)
community
copyright issues
google maps
cool service
use on other people's sites: mashups
freedom of data
my maps: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/map-making-so-easy-caveman-could-do-it.html
code of conduct
new media gradually rediscovers old media rules
can't dodge *all* the red tape
the writeable web
wikis
wikipedia
law firm collaboration
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes
Julie M: cool web stuff talk at marketing day
Richard Suskind
online communities -- some sectors lend themselves to it
youtube, myspace, livejournal
folksonomy
why did youtube grow so fast
second life - an imaginary world
mmorpgs
Blogs
MySpace (has replaced urls for bands)
LiveJournal
Ajax for web apps
Web-based communities in general
Second Life
Tagging and folksonomies
Open formats and the ability to leave services
Richard Suskind
Flickr
OpenID
mmorpgs
YouTube and why it grew so fast
map of where people live
based on their postcode and a set of directions to the office using
the Google Maps API
Tim O'Reilly Blogging Code of Conduct
microformats (Firefox Operator extension)
Google Earth and the fact that communities can do overlays, makes researching areas amazingly educational
gmail
twitter (encourages you to make what would
have been pull snippets of conversation (say if your mate called you
up and asked what you were up to) into push ones, where you barely
know half the people you're sharing with.)
social networking
linkedin
facebook