Ideas Blog

I presented at Web3.0 and the Future of Social Media Conference yesterday (see Twitter hashtag #web3).

I wanted to push ahead a few years and get the point across that we need to think about the web in a more naturalistic way. It’s not about silicon, electrons and data. It’s now has a life unto itself and displays the traits of living things.

I also wanted to focus on the way the web application and business space faces consumers. Essentially that we need to change direction and treat each individual as important, be careful with their time and relevent when we give them content and services.

Here’s my slide notes…

Burning Questions

So much technology
:: Why am I so time poor?

Photo: ToniVC

The next big thing
:: Where are we at?
:: Web 2.0, 2.5, 3.0, yada, yada.

Photo by David Prior

The Web Entity

The net is a beast
:: It has developed a life unto itself
:: Relative to natures evolution it’s a mini-beast, amoebic.

Photo by microagua

Primordial Days
:: Quality of info filters builds
:: Good levels of sharing
:: Early sensory control
:: Early utility adoption
:: Start of linked data

Life like
:: Homeostasis
:: Organization
:: Metabolism
:: Growth
:: Adaption
:: Response to stimuli
:: Reproduction

Biotic
:: Consumers
:: Employees
:: Developers
:: Investors

Abiotic
:: Applications
:: Network
:: Platforms
:: Web construct

Devices

Generation D
:: The data generation
:: The device generation

It’s about the data
:: Data surpasses the importance of the digital bodies that it lives on.
:: Data is created about data. A world of linked data.
:: Data lives on the web and Devices are windows into the web.

Data is set free.
:: User permission.
:: Socially permission.

Everything has a brand
:: People, Ideas, Services & Products. Not just companies.

Numerical Brand
:: Algorithm + vote search
:: Social bookmarking
:: Followers & friends
:: Crowd sourcing
:: Content rating
:: Like vs link

Information overload
:: We need better controllers of the data we see.

Restraint
:: We collect and regret
:: Collect = Gather and store data, experiences, apps, tools.
:: Regret = Missing something like news, ideas, experiences.

The Cost of the Habit
:: Time
:: Effectiveness
:: Self expression
:: Quality of experience

Data Addiction
The old addiction
:: Physical Consumption
The new addiction
:: Digital Consumption

Sales Automation

Educate vs Sell
:: Authenticity

Trigger vs Campaign
:: Trigger based email/mail/web

Targeted and relevant
:: Don’t waste their attention

Off balance sheet Sales
:: Community, Customers, Partners & F&F

Data Brokers

Data Brokers
:: Integrate and connect applications and data
:: Examples: WDCI, Boomi, OneSaaS

Web applications will change
:: less device dependent
:: more connected.

Application Constraints
:: Apps that don’t connect and that are feature light weights
:: Applications that are niche require hand holding

Moving data around
:: Too many pieces in the puzzle.
:: Too many connected apps to solve business problems.
:: Too many moving parts.
:: Higher risk of failure

Attention Dollar

Attention Dollar
:: The currency of the web is attention.
:: The attention police is relevance.

Attention Defined
:: 8 hours a day playing Warcraft

Photo by glenn batuyong

The Attention Economy
:: The web beast evolves based on your attention votes.
:: Your time is being absorbed by websites and apps in piecemeal
:: Systems seduce you into giving your time away.
:: Good systems will reward your time

Marketing emails
:: Like the guy at the party who talks & talks *eyes glaze over*

Attention engineered email
:: The new email regime.
:: Email that is exactly relevant to my needs in time, place and interest. e.g. Marketo

Infographics
:: Pictures trump text

by Davvi

Meta Data Driven Content
:: Wikipedia trumps Encarta
:: Twitter trumps Yellow Pages

Digital Soap Box
:: You have something you want to say
:: e.g. walls, tweets, blogs, chatter

Data and graphic rich business apps
:: Replacing numbers/words with pictures

Memetic Engineering
:: Designing business models to produce memes.
:: Capital value is based on the consumer & business Attention acquired.

Ubiquitous Web

Required Elements
:: Data, Utilities, Connection & Computation

The web is evolving based on what works & what doesn’t
:: Small nuances = Big differences

The web is getting judged, naturally selected
…and across many devices

Consumers are mini VC’s
:: Invest small amounts attention dollars

Consumers are natural selectors
:: May the best “web genetics” survive.
:: Facebook is genetically superior to MySpace? Or does it have a privacy cancer?

Do you have an iPhone?
:: How many apps have you tried?
:: Small numbers of apps survive your standards
:: The few that do have common traits

iPhone App Survival Traits
:: Extremely entertaining
:: Create or save time
:: Window into content

Utility Web

Low rather than No Software
:: Software burns time and CapEx from business
:: Software = Rekeying data, upgrade software, buy licenses & maintenance

Cloud applications / SaaS
:: Converts CapEx into OpEx
:: Google, Microsoft, Amazon are re-building the webs architecture

The Semantic Web is a WIP
:: Resource Description Framework
:: Ontology Language
:: Folksonomy

The AI Web
Mechanising our activity
:: Mechanical turks
:: True Artificial intelligence
:: Data collection and connection
:: Collective web intelligence
:: Knowledge coding
:: Recommendation Engines e.g. Apple Genius
:: Rules Engines: Triggers, Rules, Scheduled Events
:: Business Logic Layers that are flexible, learning, crowd sourced

Web Evolution

Darwinian
:: Natural Selection applies

The future will be strange
Strangeness is a consequence of innovative thinking
Ross Lovegrove

The future will be functional
its the only vehicle which have the elegance of intelligence, because it’s not driven by marketing, it’s driven by function
Philippe Starck (on military vehicles – his favourite vehicle)

User Designed Applications
:: Behavioural design
:: Relevance design
:: Theme serving

Q: With all this technology why are we time poor?
:: Shouldn’t the evolution of the web help?

A: The web doesn’t let you triage your time very well
:: We are designed to collect, gather & hunt = Quick, while it’s there.
:: We are opportunists by design

A: We are bad at delaying gratification
:: The marshmallow experiment.
:: We are still learning how to do this with financial dollars.
:: What hope is there for us with the attention dollar. It’s too easy to spend.

Web 3.0 will
:: penalise inefficiency
:: lack of connectivity
:: poor relevance

A new kind of Capital Punishment
:: Inefficient, expensive, disconnected will lose the survival of the fittest contest
Failure to be efficient
:: The new “margin squeeze”.

All business are really two+ businesses
:: They are what they normally do and they are technology businesses.
:: Survivors will have embraced this passionately
:: Survivors will ensure tech creates time rather than consuming it.

Saasu calls this
:: Engineer the way you work

Thank You

Marc Lehmann
Email: marc@saasu.com
Twitter: @marclehmann
LinkedIn: marclehmann
Web: saasu.com
Blog: saasu.com/blog
Personal blog: marclehmann.net
Address: 1st Floor, 111 Elizabeth St Sydney, Australia 2000
Creative Commons: Attribution-NoDerivs License

I’ll be speaking at the International Business Review Web 3.0 conference on the 3rd of June this year about what I call the Naturally Selected Web. Some of the topics covered in my speech I touched on in my speech at CeBIT last year about the Data Generation but at this event I’ll get into more detail about how Web 3.0 is in part about participants selecting brand and product variants in what is literally a Darwinian Natural Selection process.

Quote voucher code SAAS-WEB3 if you want an extra 10% of the 31 March early bird deadline price.

Ever wondered what your content profile looks like? Word clouds can help highlight keywords and other language patterns in your content. Wordle a nifty website lets you generate fun word clouds by simply cutting content from a document or website and pasting it into a window that then generates a word cloud.

I generated the following cloud from Saasu’s About page on our website to see what the content looked like. Visit the full size image on Wordle. Hat tip to the Stubborn Mule where I first read about this bit of fun.

Saasu.com/about Word cloud by Wordle

Introducing Saasu BlogMech. It’s a place for new bloggers and those already up and running. An educational platform to assist you in starting, managing or improving your blog.

We don’t profess to be blogging experts but the crew at Saasu find a lot of useful information and ideas in our online travels. We want to be sure you don’t miss out by passing things on as we find them, saving you some research time.

Initial coverage:

• Blog Networks
• Feed Management Platforms
• Blog Feed Readers
• Blog Publishing Platforms
• Social Tagging & Marketing Platforms
• Blog News Services

Hugh Macleod just posted an excellent overview of blogging for business in preparation for a talk he gave to PR firm Edelman.

The piece is an excellent primer for anyone that’s trying to get their head around blogging and social media for business. The advice comes from someone who has first hand experience building what he calls “global microbrands” for Stormhoek wine and Saville Row tailor Thomas Mahon.

One of the key pieces of advice, in my view, that he offers is point 5:

The growth will come, I believe, not by yet more increased efficiencies, but by humanification.

It’s an interesting dichotomy – one that I’m just starting to grapple with. I’ve been involved with the successful Earth Hour campaign, and one of the key challenges was “humanifying” what is in essence a large organisation – through both email responses and a MySpace profile.

The dichotomy is: how do you humanify and grow a company, especially when you have limited resources? How do you grow the resources to support the (when successful, ever growing) responses you get from a successful product or campaign?

This is great – an honest statement from a boss to employees.

Seth Godin: Five common cliches (done wrong).

Some of what Seth says in this post may not make a lot of sense if you’re not a regular follower of Seth’s blog. But I’ve heard the “early adapter” line before and it’s so true.

My friend Kris wrote the other day about how educators (teachers and trainers) might use the “social bookmarking” service, del.icio.us. Reading his post made me think that perhaps it might be worth looking at how a business could use such a tool.

What is del.icio.us?

del.icio.us, recently acquired by Yahoo!, is a free service that makes it easy to save your bookmarks online. Once in del.icio.us, you can access them from any computer that is connected to the web. If you work on multiple computers (say, one at work and one at home), this can be very helpful.

To bookmark a site, you can use what’s called a “bookmarklet” – which is a special link that you drag to your browser’s bookmark toolbar – to bookmark a site with one click (more information on del.icio.us’ bookmarklets can be found on this help page).

Alternatively, if you are using the Firefox web browser, you can use one of two extensions to integrate del.icio.us into the browser – one from Yahoo! that replaces Firefox’s bookmarking system with del.icio.us integration, another that extends (rather than replaces) Firefox’s standard bookmarks facility.

When you add a site to del.icio.us you can label the bookmark with a number of “tags”. Tags, if you’re not familiar with them, are short text descriptions (similar to “keywords”) that you can use to categorise your links with. Rather than a fixed and formal set of categories, you can tag a link with as many free-form tags as you like – just use as many tags to describe the link as required.

As you add more links, you will naturally get more and more tags. del.icio.us allows you to then view all of your links by tag, or search them. This makes it easier to find tags in the future – rather than having to remember exactly where you saved the link (in one specific folder for example), you can look through any number of relevant tags, or use the search function.

What makes del.icio.us a “social” bookmarking tool?

When you go to the del.icio.us home page you’ll see a list of “What’s Hot”. This list is generated because del.icio.us can tell when a specific link has been linked by a number of people. Sort of like how Google uses the number of links to a page to help determine if it is useful and relevant, del.icio.us uses the number of links to a site to identify sites of interest in the current moment.

Although this is kinda cool, it’s not the only (nor necessarily the most useful/exciting) way that the social nature of del.icio.us can be used.

Each tag also has it’s own page. If you were looking for what people are linking to about, say, laptops, you can look at the del.icio.us listing for the “laptop” tag to find out what other people are linking too (or use the model name/number to be more specific – “MacBook” for example). If you use an RSS news reader, you can also subscribe to a specific tag or del.icio.us user so you can keep track of what’s being added without having to visit the del.icio.us site all the time.

When you add a link to del.icio.us you may also see that it’s linked to by other people. If you click on the “saved by X other people” link next to your bookmark, you can browse what those other people have linked to.

Additionally, if you tag something using the “for:<username>” syntax, that will appear in the “links for you” section of that particular user’s del.icio.us profile (you can see this as a link at the top of your del.icio.us profile page after you have signed in). For example, my del.icio.us username is “grantyoung” – so tagging something as “for:grantyoung” will appear in my “links for you” section. This is a great way to share bookmarks with colleagues or friends. Sending a link this way means that only the “grantyoung” user (me) will have access to the link.

As you can see, there are many ways that the collective value of using del.icio.us’ bookmarks emerges – all from individuals saving their own pages for future reference.

But how can I use it for my business?

The most basic way that del.icio.us can assist you in managing your bookmarks across multiple computers, or simply make it easier to find a bookmark through tags or search.

If you have multiple people in your business that use del.icio.us, you can check out what your coworkers are linking to by checking their bookmarks page (you’ll need to know their del.icio.us username – then append it to the del.icio.us URL. For example, you can view my bookmarks at http://del.icio.us/grantyoung), or you could use the “for:” syntax to share links through del.icio.us, rather than sending emails. You may instead want to simply all agree on a specific tag that you use when you want to share your links – then everyone can simply watch that tag – rather than having to use multiple “for:” tags to send to individuals.

You can monitor tags related to your area business to get insight into what’s happening online, and even watch tags related to your business or product name. For example, to see what people are saying about Yahoo!, you can check the “yahoo” tag. Using an RSS news reader makes this even easier to check. You can use this as a form of market research – seeing who’s linking to you, and what people are saying about your business or product(s). (You can do similar sorts of research with blog trackers like Technorati, but that’s a topic for another post…)

If you are running an event (like a conference), you can suggest that people tag their links with a specific tag related to the event. For example, the organisers of the Web Directions conference suggested that participants use the “wd06″ tag. (You can do the same for other popular services like flickr and YouTube.)

You can also share your links via your website or company blog – there are a number of widgets and tools for various blog tools (like WordPress) that allow you to add your del.icio.us links to your site. There are other tools that will take a daily snapshot of your del.icio.us links and post them to your blog. Some tools allow you to specify a specific tag to link to.

You might use a widget like this to link to reviews of your product(s), to sites related to your area of business – to any site that you think might be of interest to your target audience.

Other services

There are services other than del.icio.us that have additional features to del.icio.us, such as ma.gnolia, reddit, Furl, and Google Bookmarks. del.icio.us, while not particularly visually attractive, is quite fast and is widely supported by other tools, and is my preferred choice. However, you may find one of these alternative services more to your liking.

Kathy Sierra posts 5 tips for (keynote) presenters and authors: Better Beginnings: how to start a presentation, book, article… [via Leisa].

The 5 (read Kathy’s post for the full details):

• Do NOT start at the beginning!
• Show, Don’t Tell
• For the love of god, DO NOT start with history!
• DO NOT start with prereqs
• MYTH: you must establish credibility up front