Incite a Blogging Riot! Web 2.0 Future Trends
I started my trek into Cyberspace back in 1999 when I attended an Internet marketing conference. I spent $5000 to hear from 20 of the Internet gurus of the 20th Century. I went away with 150 pounds of books, three-ring binders, and believe it or not cassette tapes. You think they would have just given me a link to their websites??? I still haven’t read or listened to all the materials I collected at that conference ten years ago. I was more confused and frankly overwhelmed when I left than when I arrived! It’s taken me almost ten years to recover.
I am thankful for those that pioneered this vast arena and for those that are helping me to to figure out how I am going to make web 2.0 work for me and my business. Two of my mentor’s are Coach Deb and JP Micek, creators of blog i360. They are helping me sort it all out.
OK, it’s a shameless plug, but go ahead and click on the link and experience a powerful blog/web/dynamic/marketing system. Blog i360 is a powerful social network, marketing hub. When I say dynamic, I mean it’s always moving, changing, and interacting with blogs, video portals, bookmarking sites, and most important, people. The automation saves me time and helps me spread the word. It’s much more than a blog. Blog i360 has been referred to a “blog on steroids.” It’s a hub site that works for you. Incite a “blogging riot” — try it out for free for 14 days and start to attract hundreds of raving fans.
It’s important to read what the experts are saying about the future of Social Networking. Regardless of the negative economic news, our futures are bright for interacting and building business relationships with New Media and Social Networking. It’s not good enough to “just be optimistic”, we have to take action and get involved. Here’s what some of the experts are saying about the future of Web 2.0:
Chris Brogan: New Marketing Labs
“2009 sees a few things: site mergers/acquisitions for some of the weaker social
network platforms, and a stronger push towards identity portability and
friend (social graph) portability. We love our social networks, but why
should I suddenly develop amnesia when you and I join a new one? It
should know we’re friends and treat us accordingly.”
Chris Brogan’s Website and Blog
Tara Hunt, Co-Founder Citizen Agency and Citizen Space
“Social Media will cease to be such an ‘experimental’ field in marketing and
will start to become part of the main core of good campaigns. Web 2.0
is the participatory web – which means that the power of this time is
that we are all producers. In former days of marketing, companies
delivered messages and goods and customers were meant to consume them.
Not so much any longer. Customers are major players in the arena of
marketing – I would argue more so than the marketing professionals
themselves now – so it is important to realize that and shift the
marketing program to be more about how you interact and empower those
customers rather than how you control and spread the message.”
Charlene Li, Consultant and Blogger
“The biggest innovation will be the opening of social networks so that they
can exchange profiles, social relationships, and applications. As such,
companies need to think about how they will “open” up their businesses.
For example, rather than create your own community, could you leverage
a community that already exists on MySpace, Facebook, or LinkedIn?”
Charlene Li’s Website and Blog
Susan Mernit, Co-Founder, People Software
“I see social media in 2009 becoming more and more accessible to
mainstream audiences. Twitter, seesmic, YouTube and other tools we saw
as playgrounds for the young have moved into the digerati toolbox and
are migrating to the mainstream. This means that everyone will
experience what bloggers and gamers learned at least 5 years
ago–following people online is a great way to virtually know and
screen potential contacts and friends, as well as a tool to maintain
connections. As for tech, I’m excited about personal devices–smart
phones, integrated devices–I want to see them come down in price and
go into wider distribution so people don’t need to rely so much on
computers.”
Susan Mernit’s Website
Susan Mernit’s Blog
Rebecca Moore, Director of Outreach, Google Earth
“Froma mapping perspective, you can expect to see much richer integration of
“location-aware” services with a variety of devices. For example,
mobile devices (such as those powered by Android) now commonly include
GPS. Of course this can be used for applications like “find pizza
places near me”, but also can be used, for example, when a natural
disaster hits. Imagine that local people on the ground will be able to
easily map and share where bridges are out, roads are closed, or where
emergency shelters and medical care are available. Keep in mind that in
the developing world, people have far more phones than laptops.
In terms of social media, I think we are just at the beginning of
“collaborative mapping” – people working together with friends and
colleagues to build shared maps of places they care about. Also, the
grassroots environmental organization Appalachian Voices has combined
social networking and mapping in an interesting way on their advocacy
site to end mountaintop-removal coal mining: here’s a map
of all the people referred to the site by actor/activist Woody
Harrelson, including their “degree of separation” from Woody. We might
be seeing more “social maps” like this in 2009.”
Nate Ritter: Entrepreneur and Web Developer
“The biggest changes have already started, but we’ll see the tech take shape
and make more money in 2009. They’ll make money because they’ll be
forced to with the drying up of available VC and angel capital.
(1) Location based services will proliferate and become more useful to the end user.
(2)Aggregation services will change from just “drinking from the fire
hose” to become very specific aggregation tools, perhaps with very
specific use cases. The amount of data we can consume as humans stays
limited, but filtering that data to become useful for specific reasons
is not only something that’s doable, it has an incentive… targeted
customers. Those customers might be businesses or consumers, but the
days of shooting from the hip with a shotgun approach are quickly
ending. Shooting from the hip will stay, because it’s fast, easy and
cheap (and will get faster, easier, and cheaper) to build web
applications. But being fast doesn’t mean you’re being smart.
I truly believe that 2009 is a huge opportunity. The bigger the threat, the bigger the opportunity.”
Nate Ritter’s Website and Blog:
Richard Yoo, Founder of Hush Labs and former CEO of Rackspace Hosting
“I’m not sure that things will evolve the way people have seen in the
past. I predict that it’ll mostly be about trying to figure out what users
really want and what they find most important then fine-tuning things based
on that feedback. The pace of evolution may really slow down by
comparison, but the user experience will be far better.
We’ll also see a shakedown of Web 2.0 companies – some will survive,
but many will just shut down. The ones that survive will have figured
out a revenue model, or are simply critical to their user base’s
day-to-day lives.”
