All in Web 2.0

Chris Cizilla’s White House Cheat Sheet: Bypassing the Media Filter is an oversimplification of the shifting role of social media in politics. He makes the usual “Obama is using social media to bypass the mainstream media to go directly to voters” comment, which I think misses the point.

Comments on the Federal Web Managers Council's "Putting Citizens First" White Paper

The “white paper” published by the Federal Web Managers Council in November of 2008, Putting Citizens First: Transforming Online Government. A White Paper Written for the 2008 – 2009 Presidential Transition Team, contains a series of common-sense recommendations that are clearly stated — and deceptive in their simplicity:

A Fire Upon the Web

In A Fire Upon the Deep, Vinge created a universe where different physical laws exist in different locations corresponding to different levels of communications and travel speed. This got me to thinking about the different levels of computing and networking that have existed and are evolving as arguments about what constitutes Web 2.0 continue.
Articles such as The Los Angeles Times’ Obama, the first social media president are popping up in the mainstream media and in the blogosphere. The theme is that Obama’s successful use of the web and “social technologies” in his campaign portends a new, more open, and transformative approach to government and public sector transparency.

Social Media and Enhancing the Engineering Profession's Image

In my blog post Can Social Media Help Change the Public’s Perception of the Engineering Profession? I commented on the National Academy of Engineering’s report Changing the Conversation: Messages for Improving Public Understanding of Engineering. In my original post I lauded the NAE report but suggested that any implementation program designed to change the public’s perception of the engineering profession should incorporate social media and social networking elements. In this post I discuss some of these elements.

Associations -- and Social Media -- Are Only Human

Ben Martin’s provocatively titled blog post As long as people don’t really care associations will survive addresses the common (these days) idea that social media and social networking somehow “compete” with the traditional idea of a professional association. After all, if anyone can throw together an online group of like-minded individuals at the drop of a hat, won’t professional associations inevitably lose members to such grassroots movements?
Jeremiah Owyang’s LiveBlog: What’s Wrong with the White Label Social Networking Industry?, especially if you read the comments, delivers a good snapshot of the gaps that still exist between product evangelism and the realities of implementing specialized online social networks.

What Comes After Web Sites and Online Social Networks?

Today we use the web in many ways. Traditional web sites — “places we go” on the web to do things — still exist. But increasingly, web based transactions also depend on the nature of our online relationships with other people.
I was interviewed yesterday by a Forrester Research staff member about how CIO’s (Chief information Officers) should approach the implementation of collaboration tools (click here for a list of blog posts related to “collaboration”). We talked about the usual adoption issues related to “web 2.0” applications within the enterprise.