First Tuesday tackles social media revolution

What is First Tuesday? Well, according to the web site:

First Tuesday is an independent Business Think Tank encouraging and supporting the creation of knowledge where business intersects policy, technology and innovation.

The event, held on 3 April 2007 at the Wanderers Club, was packed with a variety of business people ranging from entrepreneurs to media professionals to corporate-types. The speakers included Vincent Maher from the Mail & Guardian Online, Heather Ford, the executive director of iCommons and Mike Stopforth from Cerebra.

First up was Maher, who spoke about some of the myths concerning Web 2.0 and dispelling them. The main focus of his presentation was the philosophy underpinning Web 2.0. The first challenge is really how you define Web 2.0. He argued that Web 2.0 is really a cultural issue, a matter of style.

”In short, it is networked interoperability between people.”

Getting back to Web 2.0, the starting point is blogging, which is the equivalent of a printing press in everyone's backyard. Maher's tips included starting a blog (and he spoke briefly about Stormhoek), sharing expertise, publishing videos on YouTube, publishing photos on Flickr and releasing APIs to enable other people to build their applications on top of your own platform.

Just the beginning

As he pointed out, this is really just the beginning because with the shift to the Semantic Web (the next stage in the development of the Web), we will see an even more radical shift.

Maher then introduced www.amatomu.com (a blog tracking service he and his team at the Mail & Guardian Online created) to the attendees, together with www.muti.co.za and www.digg.com (local and foreign social bookmarking news sites) which, he told us, is driven by the users acting as editors. This is really a generation of the Web that is driven more by users than it is by traditional media and this is the power of Web 2.0.

Stopforth spoke next and he started with the statement ‘I am a geek!’. He began with a recent Dell incident.

Dell mistakenly advertised a laptop for sale on its site and neglected to add the cost of the laptop itself into the overall cost of a purchase of the laptop so anyone who ordered the laptop from the site would be charged for the shipping cost alone. The error was soon remedied but not before quite a number of orders had been placed.

Few people who placed orders for laptop really expected to receive the laptops for advertised price. What was more interesting was how Dell responded to the conversation that broke out on the local blogosphere (the term for a community of blogs) about the mistake and the cheap computers that seemed to be on offer.

Create evangelists

Stopforth made a good point about how companies don't apologise anymore and tell the truth. He suggested that Dell should have apologised for the mistake and invited the bloggers around to chat about the mistake. The opportunity was there to embrace the bloggers and create evangelists and Dell didn’t embrace the opportunity as well as it could have. The important thing is to remember that we are all human and not to forget the human touch.

When it comes to company intranets, continued Stopforth, there are opportunities to share knowledge and use an intranet as more than a glorified (and very expensive) phonebook. Intranets are valuable opportunities to cultivate an internal conversation with your employees and to achieve that you use similar tools to the tools you would use on the Web and you can use them very effectively.

Another powerful tool called del.icio.us was introduced by Stopforth to the attendees as not just a web-based bookmarking platform but also as a shared service that enables other people to see what you are reading on the Web and vice versa.

When you bring in the network feature you start building a network of trusted knowledge workers. To add to all of this you also have the option of subscribing to a variety terms and phrases to keep tabs on what other del.icio.us users are reading (Stopforth quoted a figure of around three million del.icio.us users - that is a lot of people sharing tips, ideas and knowledge).

Middle point

Ford was next up to speak about ‘how new approaches to copyright are driving alternative business models’. This is a topic I am really passionate about and it is always a pleasure to hear from her. She introduced Creative Commons as a middle point between public domain works and works under full copyright.

Creative Commons enables users to separate out a number of rights that can be granted or denied to consumers of that content. The two main questions when debating which license to apply to your content are whether to allow commercial use and derivatives. A range of sharing possibilities open up through combinations of the licensing elements available under Creative Commons. These possibilities including improved collaboration, shared wealth and more.

The Diet Coke-Mentos experiment went down pretty well as an example of a shared content model which made video sharing site, Revver, a bit of money from advertising revenue. The bottom line of Creative Commons is that it is democratising innovation both in South Africa and abroad.