Kevin Dublin's Web 2.0 Blog

Advertising Could be Slightly Failing on the Internet… at the Moment

kevindublin — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 05:18:35 +0000

I would have to say that I totally disagree with Eric Clemens about the future of Internet advertising. Mr. Clemens writes in his article “Why Advertising Is Failing On The Internet” that internet advertising is “going to be smaller, not larger, than it is today.” While I believe this may be true for the previous method of delivering internet ads, as the web changes, so will the nature of its advertising. The ads Clemens refers to are text ads that appear as banners and sidebars on web pages, typical of the Internet heyday or earlier years. Advertisers will find a way to brand their products. This could be done in several ways. Advertising could become more sponsor-like. An advertiser could sponsor a popular website and a when you type in the address it could redirect to another website before taking you to the real content. Some ads work because they play periodically throughout the program you watch, but the 15 second ads are so short it wouldn’t be productive to navigate away from the website at all.

Forced ads are the future of the internet and that’s when it’s going to get bigger. I believe Hulu.com is setting the bar with its 15 second ads. Imagine visiting a website and while reading the background dims and the page changes to an ad that you can’t click away from. The clip is long enough that it annoys you, but short enough that you don’t navigate away from the information. Many websites that redirect you already give you the choice of skipping the ad, but in a time when internet advertising is failing, the future could lead to losing the choice.

Example of a Hulu.com video preview:

Government Use of Social Media

kevindublin — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 19:57:29 +0000

I read Ana Leckenby’s article “Mexican Government is using Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and other Social Media” and realized that I’ve never accessed local government information on the internet. Did Wilmington, NC even have a web presence aside from the Wikipedia entry that I read before moving here? Of course Wilmington did have a “City of Wilmington” website, but it was very much stuck in Web 1.0. The website provided information and was fairly easy to navigate, but there was no way to interact with the page, the website wasn’t a service, and it didn’t involve a collective intelligence at all. There weren’t any of the things like those mentioned in the Leckenby article that eMexico and PROFECO were using. So I went up another level in government to the website for the New Hanover County government. It was definitely a step up. The web presence of New Hanover county was definitely utilizing social media and Web 2.0 technologies. Just as the PROFECO section of the Mexican government; the county has a twitter account. The website also hosts a few blogs, has a form to submit questions to the commissioner, county services that can be done online, and an RSS feed where users can subscribe and receive updates. While the website isn’t immersed in the latest Web 2.0 technologies and social media, having a twitter is a start. The problem with twitter is that if you don’t have active followers, it’s useless. Twitter also isn’t a Web technology that’s supposed to be used on its own. There has to be another social media used to bring users to the twitter account. This is probably why PROFECO has YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook accounts. Collective intelligence is the key to working with businesses or organizations through social media. New Hanover County government has a good start and I’ll be interested in seeing where it goes.

Contexts for Interaction

kevindublin — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 04:51:48 +0000

The thing that stuck out most to me in the first chapter of Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide was the core business message of Flickr from their slide. The simple advice “Don’t build applications. Build contexts for interaction” (page 9). I believe this statement summarizes all the most important competency mentioned in O’Reilly’s “What is Web 2.0?” article. The chapter focuses mostly on what I think is the foundation of any web 2.0 page, and that is collective intelligence and the concept of collective user value. A website that allows user interaction is much more appealing than a static page. With Flickr “the quality of search and image categorization results improve as more people view, comment on, mark as a favorite, or tag photos” (page 11), and that demonstrates how it utilizes collective user value. The book also discusses that many of the tags are human generated.

The user value discussed in terms of Netflix was totally different from that of Flickr. The section dedicated to Netflix discussed user value as a dollar amount. It valued users in terms of profit and length of membership in terms of the website. The section didn’t interest me much, mostly because it involved numbers and a graph.

The end of the chapter did pose some valuable questions in terms of business development. I maintain several websites. Most are personal or for entertainment, but there are two that provide services. One of the websites that I am trying to develop is Coat Pocket Books. I want the website to advertise my book design and printing services, but through a brand name. I stopped developing the website because I wasn’t sure how I wanted it to work exactly and had yet to create a business plan, but the questions at the end of the chapter made me think about the website again. I started thinking about how collective user value could be implemented into the website. I wondered how users could make connections, how users could participate in the website other than contacting me via e-mail and the website being just a business card. I want it to be like a more personal, smaller version of Lulu.com and other POD services. I’m still not sure how I could get it to work, especially since I would like to have direct contact with the user. This chapter brought up many questions; it made me examine my goals for the website and service.

Web 2.0 for Designers and Beyond

kevindublin — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 02:56:52 +0000

The article “Web 2.0 for Designers” by Richard MacManus and Joshua Porter from Digital Web Magazine brought up a few good points. It was interesting reading about the movement into Web 2.0 from a design aspect. Websites have changed. The individual website aesthetic of coding your own pages has changed to “pick a clean template, add your content, and host your files.” As the article says, the social web is more about the content, forgetting the “who and why,” it’s all about the “what and when.”

The information on the page and the micro-content are the most important part of Web 2.0 pages. Because of their nature the same information is found in several places all over the internet. Some of the content isn’t even read on the original place it was hosted. Users get the information on content aggregates such as Digg.com, Stumbleupon.com, Google News, or even their personal e-mail. I didn’t realize until I read the article that even I have a few websites that I receive updates with the website’s content through e-mail and rarely visit the sites.

Web 2.0 has ushered in, to borrow from J.J. Abrams and Alex Knapp, an age of immediacy. Information is anywhere, everywhere, and for right now is almost instant. Designers and internet users are flooding the internet with anything anyone might want to know and many things no one cares about. It’s all tagged and the micro-content is out in the swirling vortex of meta-data that is the core of Web 2.0.

My theory is that with so much information it will one day be extremely hard to navigate. Even now most meta-data is written so that content aggregators can find them more easily. Search engine optimization is no longer a luxury of the programmers, but a necessity of all web pages. I believe the collapse of Web 2.0 will be when more sophisticated programming is needed to slush through the dregs of the meta-data field and languages like XML or AJAX are outdated and useless.

I’m not sure how I feel about the results. Web 3.0 will probably require a much more sophisticated understanding of programming to independently navigate the internet. I think most casual surfing will require the use of new web technologies that will likely track what users are doing and share it for profit with advertisers. Internet privacy will be a luxury, and that frightens me.

Kevin Kelly of Wired Magazine says that Web 3.0 will exceed the processing power of the human brain in 30 years and humans will be co-dependent of the technology.

What is Web 2.0?

kevindublin — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 03:26:05 +0000

What is Web 2.0: A Response to Tim O’Reilly’s Article of the Same Name

Tim O’Reilly’s article “What is Web 2.0?” analyzes and attempts to define the answer to this very subjective question. The first thing the article does is create a chart of its Web 1.0 and 2.0 examples:

The above chart has a few dated websites, but overall is fairly straightforward. The websites or services listed under Web 1.0 present information or allow users to utilize a service, whereas the Web 2.0 technologies allow users to participate in the exchange of information, or in the case of BitTorrent or Napster they can become the service by hosting files.

The Web 2.0 meme map is a little confusing, but its core competencies offer a bit more clues into Web 2.0’s definition:

I think the article gets lost in itself for a while. The comparisons between the different internet applications aren’t very clear and offer little information about the companies for those who aren’t familiar. So, the article has some excess weight there.

The idea of the internet harnessing collective intelligence is in my opinion the greatest factor in defining Web 2.0. The thing that all of the Web 2.0 technologies have in common is that they strive to foster an environment where everyone can participate in the creation and the exchange of content. Wikipedia is one of the most revolutionary examples of this. Wikipedia [link] is an online encyclopedia that users create entries for and anyone can alter. While I might not use it as an authoritative source over an actual encyclopedia, I do value the website and use it almost daily for information I’d like to know.

The problem with Wikipedia and many other Web 2.0 technologies is that when it reaches a certain point it can become difficult to police. I’ve downloaded torrents from BitTorrent with the wrong files. I’ve stumbled onto several pages that had misleading tags and meta-information to host scams. I’ve also watched a friend change an entire Wikipedia entry on owls to only “Owls are gay” and it remained that way for almost five minutes.

The key to these new technologies is we must take a part in this collective. I’ve created and uploaded torrents of rare hip-hop albums. I’ve reported websites that aren’t what they advertise themselves to be. I’ve edited entries on Wikipedia that have contained biased and erroneous information. As the article states, one of the core competencies of Web 2.0 is that they “get richer as more people use them.”

By the end of Tim O’Reilly’s article I came to my own conclusion on what makes a web technology or website Web 2.0. It’s when web applications or platforms give users the ability to interact with the page, changing information, adding information, and sharing it with others. Web 2.0 technologies change websites from being static pages, into a fluid collective intelligence that can change instantly. As I said before, the definition is very subjective; what’s yours?