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The 10 C’s of Web 2.0

Found them in a Troy Angrignon‘s ChangeThis manifesto:

  • Collaboration: the first theme is about people working together, collaborating, to create software, content, communities, art, music, literature, and a multitude of other things. Web 2.0 tools and applications support this type of interaction at their core.
  • Conversation: There is a conversation happening and it’s not just happening in your corporate website forum. It is happening on blogs. It is a public conversation about politics, business, social issues, and anything else you can imagine, including your company. Tools are developing rapidly in this area and we have a long way to go, but these are exciting times. There is a conversation going on right now that you could contribute to or learn from. What are you waiting for? Join in!
  • Community: We have had online communities now for at least fifteen years or more. But the tools for building online communities are now becoming more widespread and communities are forming around every imaginable (and unimaginable) subject, product, and industry. If you are looking for your ‘tribe’, they are probably out there somewhere.
  • Connection: we are building messaging systems that now connect people to people, people to machines, and machines to machines. The names of these systems are not important but their function is.
  • Content Creation: It turns out that if you give people the tools to create ‘stuff’, they do just that. In fact, they create so much stuff that it quite frankly upsets our assumptions about who in our society are the creators and who are the consumers.
  • Cumulative Learning: think of cumulative learning as peer reviewed journals for every person on the planet with internet access. People can now build on the knowledge of others (through the miracles of search and wikis) faster than at any time in history.
  • Collective Intelligence: In certain conditions, it turns out that groups of people are smarter than individuals. This is counter-intuitive and odd but apparently true.
  • Change of scale: Web 2.0 companies can scale up fast. Because of the spread of broadband internet and the sheer number of people on the internet, we are seeing key measures (number of users, time to market, time to exit) that are quite extraordinary.
  • Core values: Openness, transparency, and a respect for users are three core values that seem to permeate Web 2.0 definitions and discussions.
  • Cheap and Fast: A key quality of Web 2.0 is that developers and entrepreneurs can build, deploy and profit from applications for less money and in less time than ever before.
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WordPress Quick Start Guide

If you wanna start blogging, and don’t know anything about blogging platforms, Teli Adlam, the “WordPress Queen” of OptiNiche Blog has a very brief and concise WordPress PDF manual which contains infos about

  • The Difference Between WordPress and WordPress.com
  • Installing WordPress and the Famous 5 Minute Install
  • Update Your Profile and Password
  • Update Your First Post, Comment, and About Page
  • Installing New Themes
  • Installing New Plugins

Download PDF here.

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Gbuy, PayPal and (Romania) Internet Fraud

Wall Street Journal reports that the long awaited competition for Paypal is going live this week. As a bonus, Google is offering mail-in rebate incentives to help sway users to using their electronic-payment system. Google plans to charge merchants a 2.2% commission on a sale, but is offering discounts to those who participate in its AdWords program.

I am wondering if the service will be available any time soon in Romania or if it will pressure PayPal to come around.

This considering the important drop (and the year to year progress) Romania had in the top of international online fraud, accodring to the IC3 report. Meanwhile, during the last 5 years the number of internet users in Romania increased by more than 5 times from less 1 million in 2001 to more than 5 million last year.

Year Place % of global onlne fraud
2001 4 0.9%
2002 5 1.7%
2003 6 1.5%
2004 7 0.92
2005 9 0.7%

The most internet fraudulent country remains US with more than 70% of online fraudulent actions.

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WikiMapia

Collaboration + tagging + Google Maps = one of the most interesting Google maps applications so far. People are basically tagging places around the world on GMaps.
wikmaps

Here is the link for Bucharest.

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Ask/Bloglines Blog Search

Even though I am still considering leaving Bloglines as my readers of choice (the reasons are not the subject of this post, but are related with the fact that I feel it lacks a lot of features available now around the web) I can’t stop not noticing their new blog search, with the great fact that they are searching what people subscribe to which should mean that we’ll get less spammy results.

Since blogging and feeds tend to be more associated with individuals rather than organizations, Ask has also implemented a sophisticated name-recognition capability. Search for a name, and for active bloggers you see links to posts by and posts about the person. Another feature surfaces “top feeds” based on a combination of relevance to your query and popularity of blogs that match your query.

Check it out here: blogsearch.ask.com

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Get Yourself (and Your Computer) World Cup Ready

World Cup is coming, and even if Romania is not there, again, I am preparing for it, so here is an interesting list of resources:

FIFA World Cup Official Website, in partnership with Yahoo!, for the second time (if I’m not wrong) is the place to start and to explore all official information for the tournament, games, the venues, etc etc.

WC Offficial Song – This time, the official song for the World Cup, “Time of our lives,” will be in charge of the opera-pop band Il Divo (who have mixed the bel canto and pop music), and six-time-Grammy-winner Tony Braxton.

World Cup Blog – We live in the 21st century so such an event couldn’t exist without several blogs around it. The worldcupblog.org seems to be the most complex one, and is dedicated to covering all aspects of the 2006 World Cup in Germany. The site features 32 country-specific blogs, a referees blog and a blog covering general tournament news. Worth a mention the BBC WC blog and the NYTimes WC Blog.

World Cup Wallpapers – getting to your computer now, here is a list of great WC themed wallpapers for your desktop.

Microsoft’s Soccer Scoreboard – even though there are two words I kinda hate in this title (and scoreboard is not one of them 😉 ) this fun program allows you to access all the latest tournament news and information with the click of a button! Live game data allow you to monitor your favorite teams progress in real-time.

World Cup Firefox Extension – for those who, like me, are lazier, they can get all the information and results straight in their favorite browser.(the page is in german, but I have no doubt you’ll manage to install the extension)

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Absolut IKEA.

What happens when two leading creative companies come together? Well, an impressive billboard. Check it out here.

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What’s Next for Online Advertising

Bumped into an interesting of well adviced opinions on the matter and just couldn’t help myself quoting some excerpts of it:

Bant Breen (Interpublic Group): Streaming video is very promising. But can we build a new industry on it? It has to be scalable. Advertisements on blogs yield lower response, that doesn’t mean that we are against advertising on blogs. I have mixed results in the viral space, but we have to be open, very open to these things.

Jason Rapp (New York Times): Standards in measurements, streaming formats etc. are needed. Advertising is a mixture of art and science. We’re focusing on the science now, but let’s not forget the art.

Ron Belanger (Yahoo): We cannot confuse direct response marketing with branding. Measurement will be the first step. Behavioural targeting is interesting, but segmentation adds complexity. For us, volume is more important than segmentation. For us, it matters which channel is important for which brand.

Jeff Lanctot (Avenue A – RazorFish): [Google] brought the accountability in the market. There will be a window of time in which new emerging models will not be accountable, e.g. podcasting. But the time will come where they will have to be accountable. On behavioural targeting: it’s just about segmentation of the user base to get more effective targeting. Not enough advertisers are telling a story. We have to engage the user, otherwise we fail.

Jed Nahum (Microsoft Adcenter): We will have to agree on standards, text lengths etc. It would be good if we could agree on API standards. Online advertising is not well suited for small business, but software solutions will make that better.

Read full and more here.

Related: The Future of Online Advertising

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