An ‘Easy Communications’ Primer
The People Effect
New media influencers are proliferating online – there are expert bloggers in every niche market and Technorati (a leading blog search engine) tracks more then 90 million blogs today. That’s up from 78 million in April of 2007.
In addition to sharing stories and opinions, people are sharing all sorts of media - known as consumer generated content (CGC) - in social networks like Facebook and LinkedIN; and in content portals like Flickr (photo sharing) YouTube (video sharing) and iTunes (audio sharing).
And every single piece of media that is uploaded online is categorized, or “tagged” by the author. Technorati currently tracks more than 250 million tags (July, 2007).
The Technology Effect
Enabling this huge public publishing push is cheap, easy to use publishing technology. Blog software is free and extremely easy to use. Computers have built-in video cameras, and phones have built-in cameras and video. Anyone can be an online, multimedia publisher today.
Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is the ultimate consumption technology. RSS allows publishers to feed their content simply and easily from their web sites to their readers. When readers subscribe to their RSS feeds, they’re automatically delivered to email inboxes, to phones and PDAs - anytime information is updated. Information comes to you as it happens…
Or you can set up persistent searches for categories (tags or phrases) you’re interested in, and anytime someone tags their content with your search phrase, you’ll have it delivered right to you immediately.
RSS is built into blog software, to social networking applications and into web sites. All you have to do is turn it on, and you’ll notice RSS icons (like the little gray one below my categories) are cropping up everywhere online.
The Read/Write Web
And with RSS platforms like that from Attensa, people can now instantly read feeds from within their email, react to them by adding their comments or thoughts, and publish their reactions along with the original feed to their own blog, their company’s intranet site or Wiki.
Knowledgeworkers are at the precipice of an explosion of productivity, enabled by the brains of their peers and the technology that’s now wrapping around every thing we do. It’s great to be alive.
