Web 2.0 – Beyond the Hype

I’m at the Nomadic Marketing course at UCT, and Mike Stopforth’s from Cerebra is doing a talk on Web 2.0 – “Beyond the Hype”.

Mike starts off with a story about how Dell was “giving” away free laptops with their broken e-Commerce platform. This was a good example of how the news spread through the blogosphere and Internet, virally. Importantly, Mike notes, Dell was paralyzed by the huge upsurge in orders – (2500 in 9 hours!), and they didn’t know how to deal with the Public Relations nightmare that was brewing, due to corporate paralysis (the US office had to approve any statements, etc).

The new Web Trend Map was put up – to show how everything is interlinked.

Mike also put a quote up from The Cluetrain Manifesto:

“A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter, faster than most companies.”

Now – it’s video time, produced by a professor of anthropology:

This video strikes a chord with what we are tring to achieve with Synthasite, in making the web an easier place to publish – regardless of all the complicated underlying frameworks & constructs.

The DNA of Web 2.0

Social Networking
Decentralisation
Diversity
Tagging (folksonomies)
RSS/XML

Mike spent a bit of time discussing Del.icio.us and what makes it work.

Mike is winding down, whilst discussing blog, blogging and aggregators such as Technorati, Amatomu & Afrigator.