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Posted On
Sep 15, 2007
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 To many people today Web 2.0 may just seem the latest in the never-ending succession of Internet trend, but just like the Internet I can see Web 2.0 staying for long. It mat be or may not be a bubble of sorts, but after reading on so many social networks and search engines I can say that sites like MySpace and Digg place a perfect lesson to teach corporate establishments.
As per me Web 2.0 is a package of both threats and opportunities, the time to take your head out of the sand is now and realize if we can make use of it or let it fade away.
I would like to discuss Web 2.0 in detail, to start with let me define it for you
What is Web 2.0?
Let’s start by examining what exactly we mean by Web 2.0. In its most basic sense, Web 2.0 refers to any tool or application that's delivered over the Internet and allows people to interact—by contributing, editing and sharing content.
Most of the people conceive Web 2.0 as rise of bloggers, the growth of social networking, but as per me Web 2.0 goes beyond even that. It means freedom to connect and share with your friends. If your company uses any kind of software as a service that’s Web 2.0. If you designing a service oriented architecture that also Web 2.0. It has evolved as a complete medium now.
The above figure shows the sum of ideas that radiate out from the Web 2.0 core.
Web 2.0- Evolution of Business Online
The biggest change brought by Web 2.0 was the way companies communicated and gathered information. Web 2.0 streamlined communications.
RSS is a radical step forward. Podcasting, though in its infancy, is coming on strong having caught the attention of advertisers as a new means to reach the cutting edge public. In fact, just as anyone can set up and maintain a blog, today the technology exists to set up your own broadcast network complete with specialized shows for niche markets like pregnant parents or home schoolers.
I would like to place some examples here
One of the most popular site Digg.com is a perfect example as it combines many of the Web 2.0 components. Unlike any traditional news publication, end user writes the news that appears on the site. News they write and like is further linked to their profile. Their profile is linked to their friend’s profile allowing a whole social group checking out recommendations. There’s some programming and blogging included with it .
Another fine example is MySpace, one of the best social networking site. Users share music, pictures, videos, thoughts and meet new people with similar interests through their online links. If your friend likes a super hero, than you might start to look for it as well.
Web 2.0 is simply about evolution of online businesses. Google is changing from a search engine to an advertising company. Email is Email is being sidelined into a business niche by instant messaging. Outlook and Office are becoming increasingly redundant as PIM applications are being Ajax’d.
Getting everything online has never seemed so important.
Web 2.0 benefits
As the Web 2.0 grows, the more web evolves further benefiting end users.
Digg has taken a cut to traditional publishing, with users proving pretty good at finding stories that satisfy their own demographic - and its popularity is a testament to that.
Flickr has provided free photo hosting for millions. Thanks to some great coding, sharing photos with other people has never been easier. Web 2.0 sites provide some of the best functionality and fun on the web. Isn't that pretty neat?
Lets take a look at some success stories associated with Web 2.0
Intel assembled a Web 2.0 Suite Of Their Own
Intel few months back announced their endorsement of the Web 2.0 era with SuiteTwo (fundamental shift toward open, flexible, and participatory computing models), a combination of several Web 2.0 applications designed to operate on PC-based hardware. It was designed for small to medium-sized business customers and costs between $175 and $200 per user per year.
Web 2.0 helped them provide an advantage of logging to a single page, and access all of the functions of RSS feed, a wiki company and Newsfator, as if they were one holistic service. Remarkable!
Their three core capabilities are RSS, wikis, and blogging, Business 2.0 has been a core function for Intel as they tried giving a huge advantage of these platforms to the next generation of solutions.
Netscape embraced Web 2.0 for their new Site
Netscape, owned by AOL, was given a makeover some time back. Though Netscape had 11.4 million users it still trailed in the browser and portal market behind Microsoft , Mozilla, Yahoo and Google. The new site was built with an idea of taking advantage of social bookmarking and social media where people submit the content and it moves up to the top. But they realized that something was missing there as well.
Finally, they came up with a site that was a hybrid of a news portal and a tagging.
It had 30 different categories to choose news and ranked stories from. The site was managed by a team of editors, or "meta-journalists," who kept strict watch on posted content and either fact-check stories or augmented them with their own interviews and/or commentary. The editors also moved up stories that are more timely or newsworthy.
Web 2.0 content rules
There has been a huge transformation of the old media companies into new media companies. After several years of science, technology and medical publishing, there was a digital platform that included a healthy dose of Web 2.0 technologies. There has been a marked transition from process to content.
So its time for us to ask ourselves “What modifications have we seen between your old environment and the new one”?
Today some companies seem a little apprehensive to Web 2.0 as they think they not ready for it.
This is for all those companies who want to put the idea forward, but needs conviction.
Web 2.0 is not that new anymore. It's infusing every business, so it's becoming less about the technology per se and more about its application.
Today we lead through content, not process. It's not good enough to be just a competent business manager; you have to add to your skill set a fairly sophisticated and deep understanding of how to manage technology-based business, even if your business is not based on technology. Because if you don't know how something like a Web 2.0 technology will add value to your business, you'll miss it. Every company has to raise its overall technical insight.
So. if you want to be a technology leader today, you have to get energy from Web 2.0, you have to dig it.
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Posted On
Sep 08, 2007
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 I’m quite fond of the Really Simple Syndication (RSS), but it hasn't always been this way. Over the last year or so, while i slowly built a list of RSS feeds for the BBC Web site, I continually scratched my head and wondered, "What's the point?"RSS technology is a result of the growth of XML and its ease of use. It allows Webmasters to produce XML news feeds for their sites easily. Those who run reader software can subscribe to and read the feeds. I understood how RSS worked. What I didn't get was who would see the feeds, why they would read them, and what they would do with the links.
RSS is not a new concept, but many people I know have been very apprehensive of online tools such as this one. People make so many efforts to browse through the bookmarked sites to check which ones have been updated. But anybody using RSS can quickly see the new content. The combination of alert mechanism and information filter is very useful especially where people like me wasted a lot of time opening some slow- loading, graphic-heavy pages. RSS feeds definitely saves a lot of time and money.
What is RSS?
We can call RSS as a family of Web feed formats that are used to publish frequently updated content such as blogs, podcasts or news headlines.
People all over the world have discovered the value of using news aggregators to subscribe to news feeds and updated content from from blogs, newspapers, journals and other Web sites.
I think RSS are not just useful for keeping up to date professionally, but one can also make use of the same to make your library sites timelier and more interesting for their visitors. Information experts are taking advantage of this information in an RSS format to create some new content.
There are basically four different feeds published from your blog. These are:
• Posts feeds - this is the feed for your most recent blog posts. Comments - the most recent comments from the whole of your blog.
• Per-post comments - the most recent comments made to a particular post.
• Labels - posts or comments linked to a particular label in your blog.
RSS feeds offer a unique channel for distributing content that can help expand your audience to people beyond those who visit your web site.
RSS feeds can also be an important part of a search marketing campaign. Well optimized feeds can also gain prominent placement on search engine result pages, attracting even more traffic. The image below shows how it works
RSS can do much more than just giving your headlines
Today one can instantly publish or receive bits of text because of the wide spread Internet. There is no limit to what RSS can do than just showing latest news and blog updates. It carries marketing skills that can prove very powerful to any user or firm.
In the simplest example, you could spiff up your Web site by adding RSS feeds from news services or blogs that will intrigue site visitors. More strikingly, in the future, RSS may handle marketing tasks where e-mail now falls flat. As with e-mail, visitors can sign up for marketing alerts (for instance, useful product news plus discount coupons). Unlike e-mail, visitors can rest assured that they can't be spammed. If you don't like what you're getting via RSS, just pull the plug.
Today a very small number of people use RSS, but that might change very soon. As RSS support is integrated into other appls such as IM and email, it will soon be a big deal. People will have no choice but to start thinking about it.
The growing importance of RSS
RSS is moving ahead as a communications medium that helps companies trace a new way to reach their potential customers, promote products and services enhance the overall visibility of their firm. RSS controls the power of Internet to enable companies to communicate more effectively with each of its specific audiences,
In addition RSS can provide high tech startups with a direct link to the most influential audience segment, and the one that can help your company grow the fastest. Whether read on their PC, PDA, or cell phone these key influencers rely on RSS everyday to catch up on technology trends and important new developments.
We can say that RSS is quickly entering the mainstream. Today, many of the largest, most established publishers such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, and Fortune provide news in RSS format. Others will surely follow. In the corporate world, many companies have already discovered that effective use of RSS can improve a company’s search engine rankings.
Where companies all over the world approach through push medium, RSS is a pull medium. Readers choose to receive specific content via RSS reader. For any company this might help them circulate their press release to editors of customers who express specific interest in their product or technology.
The best examples of push sales are today’s traditional media (television, newspapers. radio) that provides the same information out to many readers. While on the other hand this pull medium may sound very interesting to a lot of companies. It’s strength lies in the very granting of permission of those who choose to receive it. Those who elect to pull in your content are going to be the ones who really want to read it, and there is great power in that.
Companies such as Microsoft and IBM syndicate information via RSS feeds to reach specific external audiences such as the media, Wall Street analysts, customers, partners, distributors, and resellers. Intel offers a suite of feeds that includes Intel Products, Intel Press Room, Intel Investor Relations, Software at Intel, Networking and Communications, Intel Reseller Center, and IT@Intel. It also offers country-specific RSS feeds from Brazil, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, and others.
Lets take a look at some of the world’s best companies that effectively implemented RSS technology to their advantage
Ebay
 eBay has recently added RSS feeds to its search results, allowing users to track their favorite auction items in their news readers. Given that most RSS readers only check for new feeds every half hour, listings in the feeds won't have an end time less than 15 minutes from the time the feed is retrieved.
Yahoo and MSN
Companies like Yahoo and MSN have integrated RSS into their offerings.
MSN has started an early test of a Web-based RSS (Really Simple Syndication) aggregator, while Yahoo has expanded into mobile access to the news feeds gathered on its My Yahoo personalized home page service.
 
Both moves signal a growing interest in the RSS news reader market that has largely been dominated by upstart companies providing both desktop aggregators and online services for reading news feeds.
Growing future of RSS
Pushing advertising through RSS has already begun. Both Yahoo Google began experimenting with the concept earlier this year.
RSS is a great way to prime the pump and deliver information to the many different audiences that can benefit your company. It is perhaps the most effective way yet to leverage the vast reach of the Internet, by putting the right information in the right hands at the right time. Whether, it serves as an external means of promoting your company and its products and services, or as part of your internal efforts to make your employees more knowledgeable and more productive, RSS will be a part of your marketing communications efforts.
In short this simple tool with the funny sounding name, is just what you need to improve your company’s content deliver, increase your online visibility and search engine rankings, and generate more traffic.
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