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Web 2.0 Expo – The Next Generation of Tagging

Kakul Srivatava from Flickr spoke about how tagging is evolving. Tagging started as a way to find things or to play with friends and family. Then additional meaningfulness was found from community tagging – things the author would not have thought to mention. Inferred tags used in clustering, hot tags, places, etc. can show you what is important at a point in time.

What’s next?

  • More Metadata – using subtags (people, regions, etc), machine tags, “suggest” tags, “correct” tags, “play” tags to merge data sets and get new connections and meanging.
  • More Network Magic – is this interesting? is this related? is this a story? is this news? To find more information and new relevancy.
  • Greatest Challenge – all this data requires more and more screen space so how do you make it available and useful?

Using tagging on your business website can help your readers find more relevant content on your site, which increases their length of stay (and the opportunity to brand and/or sell to them).

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Web 2.0 Expo – Yahoo, Google change Web, kinda

The wave of tech information is starting to drag me under. So many great web solutions to problems that businesses have. As the last day of the conference, I’m starting to reach critical mass.

Yesterday I watched two internet titans decide to embrace open, user friendly web platforms for us mortals. This could be exciting for our business web developer community.

In their keynote, Yahoo! announced a Herculean task to re-wire every part of their platform to open up access to outside applications. Starting with the recent announcement of Search Monkey, Yahoo! is making bold moves to bring web developers into their house and offer them warm cookies and fresh milk. Their idea is to make their web properties sticky, keeping people on Yahoo’s network though stealth because the interconnections made though 3rd party web apps will drive them back in. Thats not as sneaky as it sounds, many many web application platforms work in the same way (Facebook is natorious for its locked-in platform for web applications). The appeal to web app developers like me is the potential for huge, fire hose style traffic curves coupled with some of Yahoo’s cooler properties like Flickr, Mail, Search and Finance. This won’t happen overnight, but if Yahoo can keep its focus though all the distractions, then they have a real chance at stealing the hearts and minds of some influential developers. Those developers may just change the web.

Later that same day, Google took the mic in the big hall to discuss Google Apps Engine. The company line here is that Google wants to “help the internet scale” by opening up access to its massively scaled data hosting platform. That’s a cute little sound bite, but I personally suspect it has more to do with the decision to monetize spare computing power, a decision Amazon had years ago Google’s offering goes a bit further than Amazon, building out every aspect of the stack to allow web sites and web apps to use Google to host up their online ideas. Once you get past the initial ‘I can have my little web site running on Google’ daydream fantasy, you see that there are some severe limitations as of today. Apps need to be written in Python, which may be a hurdle for some. They need to interact with Big Table, Google’s unique persistence layer. Big Table is not a relational database, so you really need to rethink how you interact with your data. Outbound web interactions are limited to 1MB transfers per connection and http calls only for outside web services. The service is free today for beta but expect that to change in the future. These limitations aside, you cannot deny that when Google sets a path for the future, it draws a considerable crowd of followers (some may say sheep) If Google can make this app engine viable, they may have once again changed the web as well.

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Web 2.0 Expo – Creating a Coherent Social Strategy for Business

So you think you should add a social network or blog to your business website. What planning should you do to make this an effective undertaking and one with measurable ROI? Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff from Forrester Research presented a simple strategy from their book Groundswell: POST.

  • P – People – Access your customer’s social activities. There are different roles people play on your website/community (from Forrester’s social technographics ladder): creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators, and inactives.
  • O – Objectives – Decide what you want to accomplish. Different departments in your company will probably have different objectives (research – listening, marketing – talking, sales – energizing, support – supporting, development – embracing).
  • S – Strategy – Plan for how relationships with customers will change.
  • T – Technology – Decide which social technologies to use. Since you know the objectives these will be measurable.

To create a successful community you’ll need to engage your audience by creating a place they want/need to go regularly – asking them questions, listen to their ideas, create a place they can get advice and help each other. Start with your customers, choose objectives you can measure, line up front-office backing, get the naysayers on your side, and start small, but think big. Adding community to your business website can help you understand your customers and improve your products and services to increase sales.

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