Mckinsey wrote a report on 2.0

Another report on 2.0 and how corporations are using it. This one’s from Mckinsey and it’s called Six ways to make Web 2.0 work.

It’s okay-ish. If you’re an enthusiast, then you’ll probably like it. But it’s not very good at pointing out that:

Edelman digital trends series

Edelman’s Steve Rubel is publishing a series of  ‘insights‘ into digital trends.

I’ve read the first one (17 Feb, pdf 2mb) and it’s a pretty good overview.

More about blogs

The BBC has an editorial strand called City Diaries, in the business section (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7788608.stm).

Are these blogs? Are they user generated content? Are they vox pops? Are they amateur journalism?

Corporate blogging

Had to stop and think when I read the corpcomms magazine’s feature story about corporate blogging.

According to the article PR departments don’t get it:

“Blogs are supposed to be personal, opinionated, informal and discursive. The idea is to create a buzz, to start a debate and to stimulate interest. But a lot of buttoned-up, controlling PR departments just fail to understand this.”

What does the article’s author want: corporate courage? For the sake of what? A low-cost marketing tool?

Web 2.0, social networking, and the rest … not the point

In his Prospect review of Against the Matchine by Lee Siegel, We-Think by Charles Leadbeater, and Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky, Andrew Keen says:

“If this debate between Shirky, Leadbeater and Siegel about the relationship between community and technology sounds familiar that’s because it is. It’s at least version 5.0 of a conversation about industrial society begun by Rousseau and Marx and then, as the Web 2.0 crowd likes to put it, “remixed” by everyone…”*

He ends the article by drawing the focus out a little wider:

Press releases, templates, activity over passivity

Todd Defren, Shift Communications, has posted the company’s updated social media press release.

Helping companies structure their online content is always a good thing. It’s quite generous of Shift to offer the template for free.

One of the template’s strengths is it’s using the medium’s innovative structuring potential and moving beyond the metaphor of the *page* (avoiding using the web as a kind of backlit book).

No mincing

If you haven’t read Jakob Nielsen’s December 07 Alertbox, Web 2.0 can be dangerous then have a quick go; let him take you back to basics with lines such as:

‘…on the Web, most people are bozos and not worth listening to.’

‘…most business tasks are too boring to support community features…’

and

Over-tubed

Definition: when a company’s web 2.0 presence out-ranks its official or sales sites on Google and other search engines.

Overclocking the web activity for an organisation might go like this:

A contentious blog posted the Xmas before last by the ex-web editor comes top in Google rankings.

Just don’t call it “loser-generated content…”

Matthew Stibbe over at Bad Language draws our attention to the wonderful StupidFilter Project.

The idea? “To create a filter that will do for idiotic online content what spam filters do for junk mail”.

From the StupidFilter FAQ:

Q: Isn’t filtering stupidity elitist?
A: Yes. Yes, it is. That’s sort of the whole point.

The team are currently seeding their program with user-generated comments from places like Youtube, “that ever-inspiring font of stupidity”. You can check out the sort of stuff they’re churning up on their “randomized stupidty” page here.

Just hit refresh a few times and you’ll weep for the future of the internet.

And here’s xkcd’s take on the same subject…

Royal YouTube

While *Le Web 3* organizers happily parlay about their version of Web 3.0, and while developers continue work to realise Tim Berners Lee’s conception of Web 3.0 (Symantic Web/giant datatbase), Web 2.0 has just received the royal stamp of approval.

The UK’s first Family has dived into YouTube, adding its home videos to hundreds of thousands of other people’s. They’ve called it the The Royal Channel.