Last night we attended a great talk given by Amy Walters (political analyst for CNN) about the upcoming US elections and the ongoing democratic primaries. Because of recent private changes I got somehow involved into US politics. Even though I’m just an observer from outside, it’s interesting to watch the political process and how the political landscape of the US seems to change (oh, there it is, the “c” buzzword!) right now.
Anyways, I found especially one quote of Amy Walters interesting. The discussion was about how many people one politician attracts to come and fill up civic centers compared to the other. It’s often seen as indicator for popularity. But, as polls show, it’s not. At least the number of people going to civic centers doesn’t reflect the polls in any sense. It’s a matter of the target group: civic centers are filled up by the “rally people”. People who have time and money to go there.
It made me think about the hype around Web 2.0, the next big thing to generate millions page views and create so much more awareness about your product.
Most Web 2.0 services still only attract the “rally people”: people who have time to spend online and participate in whatsoever web service or people who are somehow professionally involved (mostly techies and PR guys). Or people who spend their saturday afternoons to write blog posts about themselves instead of doing their weekly grocery shopping.
I think all the countless Web 2.0 services, all the effort, still focuses on a very limited group of society.
Although it’s fascinating to see politicians heavily using Web 2.0, their real business, collecting votes, lies outside the web. That’s what polls teach us. The next president isn’t going to be elected by YouTube views, Facebook friends or Blog subscribers, but by real people with real issues they are concerned about.
How cool is that?
Facebook asks you to import contact data from almost any popular email provider. As for the other direction, getting your contact data out of Facebook again, they aren’t quite as liberal as tech geek blogging celebrity Robert Scoble found out:
Why do this?
I wanted to get all my contacts into my Microsoft Outlook address book and hook them up with the Plaxo system, which 1,800 of my friends are already on.
It’s ironic that you can import your Gmail address book into Facebook but you can’t export back out.
2008 will bring us a lot more superb stories about social networks I guess. Monetizing the social graph has just begun. Personally I’ve observed myself withdraw information and increase privacy settings on some services. Until it becomes clearer what social network marketers have in mind, I’ll be more careful with personal information.
…when you search across 2 social networks for a phone number before trying the public telephone directory.
A couple of local Viennese Flickr users are meeting up – right, only meeting up, even if it seems very trendy nowadays to call 2+ people walking around with cameras “photowalk” – however, there’s a meeting planned for next Saturday 11th August 4pm at Karlsplatz, subway exit Secession, and then later starting around 8pm at Rupps, Arbeitergasse 46.
Everyone enjoying photography and not scared by a bunch of photo-Flickr-addicts is very welcome to drop by!
Some more information has been posted at the forum threads:
The most exciting thing about those meet-ups is, it’s not about Web 2.0 evangelism. It’s about real people, users in flesh and blood meeting face to face. It’s about people who share a passion and socialized by the help of a Web 2.0 platform. Most of them don’t even know what Web 2.0 is, frankly, why should they, it’s only a marketing term. For me those meet-ups demonstrate what Web 2.0 really is about: the people who make the fancy buzzword successful.
Not surprising, participation in social networks strongly correlates with social origin. The following charts about a recent Facebook poll (clever polling btw, Facebook knows the basic information as age, gender, etc. of users who respond to polls) shows that Facebook is mainly a young white thing. Well, originally it was developed as and a good part of it still is a college student network.
Whereas in that case I’d rather say that white can be substituted with the term “(upper) middle class”. Without being aware of any detailed research, I suppose the overall picture about the Web 2.0 audience here in Europe wouldn’t differ a lot from this basic Facebook poll results.
So, the question popping into my mind was: are social networks increasing the Digital Divide instead of narrowing it? Are social networks an exclusive toy for (upper) middle class people?
One of the most compelling arguments for Web 2.0 are the low barriers of entry. So, where is everyone? Or maybe it’s because members of a family of six sharing a 50sqm apartment have other things to worry about than updating a blog.
However, I’m quite convinced that being familiar with social software (blogs, wikis, networks, etc.) will be a crucial requirement for future work environments. Just like as it’s now naturally to know how to perform a Google search or handle Email correctly. Thus I think it’s time for politicians to start a discussion about how to bring this knowledge to socially disadvantaged people. Students and other well-skilled people will learn this anyways over the next years…
I just tried to find a second opinion or review about a new restaurant I’d like to go and went therefore across some local recommendation sites.
Qype, the European version of Yelp, was one of them.
One thing on Qype, which I visited for the first time btw, called my immediate attention: the geocode in the address bar, where a 5-digit NUTS code followed by a place name showed up.
NUTS (Nomenclature d’unités territoriales statistiques) is a geocode standard for referencing the administrative division of countries for statistical purposes in Europe. [Wikipedia]
First of all I found it rather fascinating that a trendy 2007 Web 2.0 company, in times of folksonomy and the semantic web, makes use of an old and dusty statistical classification standard developed during the 1980s.
The second thought was already that, since we are dealing a lot with those region codes because it’s the only way to homogenized European statistical information, I can dynamically link our regional databases directly to Qype sites without having to deal with place name, spelling and search accuracy issues.
Considering that option, Qype is probably one of the best resources for a general overview of NUTS regions. Other regional information sites usually provide different, mostly national, views and definitions of regions. Actually I’m not aware of a resource where you can go through all European NUTS regions and get for each a homogenized picture and description.
An amusing detail is that you even can search by NUTS codes instead of place names in Qype: for instance looking up “pizza” in “AT130″. The local search any hardcore statistician ever dreamed of came true in Qype!
The restaurant was I Carusi btw, anybody been there yet?
Today I’ve found a solution how to stay up to date where all the young hip people are going out in Vienna: it’s easy, just follow the “bobo” tag on Tupalo!
Tupalo is a Vienna based mapping-”Stuff in your Neighborhood”-start-up, a social networking site where people can easily pin-point their favorite spots on a map, rate and review them and share experiences. I started liking it mainly because it reminded me of a couple of nice places I went once, but for some reasons forgot about them and never came back again. So Tupalo is responsible for my quite long wanna-go-again list.
Among other features users can subscribe to all kinds of feeds on Tupalo. What I did to catch up with the local hip crowd is to subscribe to the bobo-RSS-feed. Since Tupalo is a mapping application, the RSS feed is of course GeoRSS flavored and can be placed immediately on a map. Each time a new hot bobo venue pops up in Vienna, I’ll get informed what and where it is right away! Great!
Just imagine for a moment how this a video would look like if you exchange Barack Obama with the Austrian chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer.
[youtube wKsoXHYICqU]
As we found out yesterday the Viennese BarCamp audience are lazy travellers and not, unlike other nations, wandering like pilgrims from one BarCamp to another.
Nevertheless BarCamp Vienna was a great event and everyone interested in local Viennese yourfavoriteweb2.0buzzwordgoeshere projects, people, discussions, etc. is encouraged to join one of the upcoming BarCamps in Vienna. Since we aren’t going anywhere this’ll be the only possible way to get personally in touch with us.
One thing I definitely learned yesterday was that Open Space Technology is a brilliant method to initiate very productive discussions. Maybe it’s because of the participants, who else other than enthusiastic people decide to get up early and spend an entire Sunday at an unconference instead of relaxing at a pool, or is it because the self-organization makes most participants feel somehow responsible for the event and therefore they really try to get the best out of it?
Anyways, it’s a good concept and I wonder if OST can be successfully transferred to other topics in my field too, definitely worth a try.
Thanks to the organizers and werkzeugH, they did a wonderful job!
Read/WriteWeb offers an interesting review – as most of their articles – about Yahoo! Travel, referring to the Web 3.0 framework.
What I’m missing in that framework is the user’s share in the big C standing for the commerce.
Let’s take Yahoo! Travel and Flickr as example:
Most Flickr users pay Yahoo! for a Flickr pro account ($25/year), get a great platform in return and have fun participating and sharing photos. In the meantime, as result of millions excited users, Flickr has grown to one of the largest and best documented photo databases ever. Of course Yahoo! seeks for ways to leverage that database in other parts of its business. Like Yahoo! Travel for instance, where Flickr user photos can be viewed to illustrate travel destinations.
Now the problem I see is that especially pro users wont be happy about the fact that their pictures show up on Yahoo! Travel right next to tourism ads and the entire revenue goes exclusively to Yahoo!. Even if Yahoo! has, according to Flickr user agreements, the right to do so and doesn’t care if a “© All rights reserved” stands next to the user photo. It’s just bad karma.
I think in the long term a solution about that issue – commercializing user generated content – must be found. Otherwise why should a paying Flickr pro user provide Yahoo! with free photos for other Yahoo! divisions than Flickr?
Anyone remember the discussions about user content when YouTube was acquired by Google? Some users got slightly upset seeing Google paying billions of dollars for basically user content…