And then things became a little fancier and you could host a form on your site to allow people to send others links to your site. By email.

Plug-ins soon came along, and you could embed content from other sites in your site. And let visitors provide their own content (comments, etc) on your site.

All on your site. Or sent by email.

The great thing these days is that you can easily provide tools to allow visitors to share your content on other sites for you, and to follow your site on other sites. Its about moving the conversation.

Two tools which really illustrate this are Twitter and Add This. I’ve written before about Twitter and how I’ve integrated it into London for Free. I’ve already attracted quite a few followers – people who now don’t need to come back to my site to see info I’ve added about events. Instead, they will see my twitter post on either twitter itself or a twitter content aggregation site.

Add This is an excellent plug-in to allow visitors to London for Free to share it on other sites such as Facebook, delicious and more. And every time they do, it doesn’t just benefit them. It benefits my site. The more times my site can be linked to the likes of Facebook and other popular sites, the better. Though these links aren’t treated as proper inbound links by search engines, they help to advertise my site.

Two simple ways to promote your site on other sites and support conversations by visitors about it anywhere.

Facebook is interesting. So you can pop in, check out your mates, see what they are up to, maybe browse some shared links, photos and videos, do a fun quiz and so on. And, er, that’s more or less it. If your friends don’t actively participate, it soon becomes a bit dull.

Last.FM on the other hand offers endless hours of great music and thousands of playlists, whether your “offline” friends participate in the community or not.  You don’t just need to rely on the content selected by your friends. And once you do start to build up a list of friends, Last.FM gets even better. For starters, with the fire.fm plug-in, you can play your friends playlists direct from your firefox browser bar without needing to visit the Last.FM website. And if you don’t like your friends’ music tastes, you can search for other people whose music you DO like and invite them to be friends. And then you can easily find and play their playlists…….. and so it goes.

There are also groups and radio stations (aka playlists) for different types of music, musicians, eras and more. And if you search by artist, you not only see their music and groups but also tour dates and other events.

But its not quite perfect – yet. Once you register, you get a profile page and though Last.FM cleverly personalises it for you by making recommendations based on what you’ve previously listened to, there’s not a lot you can actually do to customise your profile. And you do have to pay around £1.50 a month to get access to advert-free content.

If only the music-related content of Last.FM could be merged with the community tools of Facebook. Now THAT would be worth paying for!

I read somewhere recently that its the fastest growing website at the moment so I wanted to figure out how it works and why it is so popular – and also how it really differs from social networks like Facebook.

And how organisations could make use of it.

Then yesterday I saw that Stephen Fry tweets obsessively. So I decided to follow him. That’s what you do with Twitter. Rather than invite your friends (as in Facebook), you “tweet” (read “post a status update”) and if people choose to, they can simply follow you and see all your posts.

And its true, he does tweet a lot (Stephen, I mean – he feels like a friend now, or am I a stalker??).

Now I’m a huge fan of Facebook, I absolutely love it, but that’s probably because I just love talking to people, making friends with folks from all walks of life, keeping in contact with mates from previous jobs – and I’ve had quite a few of those lately – exchanging laughs, info, links, ideas, generally chatting, learning and sharing both the good times and the bad.

Facebook is a great tool for doing all this stuff – but it requires a bit of effort to upload photos, add links, and do anything beyond status updating to keep your profile pages fresh and interesting. Not that many people bother doing this, of course.

Some people just do status updates, if anything at all.

Ah yes, the famous Status Update. One of the most interesting aspects of it, I think. But the problem with updating your status is that if you do it too often it can feel as if you are dominating the conversation. It does to me, anyway.

Not with Twitter. The more tweets you post the more fun it is. Hourly tweets, even minute by minute (see Stephen Fry’s).

And that’s pretty much it with Twitter. Some call it microblogging, but you can’t – as far as I can tell – do anything around or beyond the “blogging” part. No sharing photos, adding sidebars for links, widgets and so on.

Short and simple – but constant. One to many – but pull rather than push when it comes to reader consumption.

I can see loads of use cases for enterprises when it comes to Twitter. Informing customers of “flash” sales and events (food tasting anyone?), “use within the hour” promotion codes, urgent product recalls, store temporary closures, news flashes, the list is endless.

And if you look at the public timeline you can see loads of examples.

I have now come to love Twitter. I still love Facebook too. So I’ve brought them together but its a one way relationship. My Facebook updates appear in Twitter – but only updates on Facebook appear on Facebook. I don’t want to spam people or crowd the conversation.

Right, I guess its time for my next tweet. See you there!

Some people are generally curious about the whole idea of them and want to learn more, others see them as a waste of time and potentially dangerous. But for every conversation I have with someone (such as my partner) trying to warn me about the trouble they have caused and why I shouldn’t write it , I have another with someone else who thinks they are great and that I should keep on writing.

So why do I do it? Here’s why.

• I write it so I can learn about it, so I can understand this thing called blogging

• I write it because I can – I am privileged to live in a country which supports freedom of the press and free speech

• I write it because I believe in the voice of the everyday person needing to be heard for political, social and cultural reasons, no matter how inane the conversation

• I write it because I enjoy sharing knowledge, always have, always will – I’ve learned loads from the web and this is my small way of giving something back

• I write it because its an easier and more accessible way of communicating what I am up to with a wide group of family and friends than by email

And yes, I fully appreciate the dangers of not only blogs but of social media in general (people being sacked for their Facebook comments and so on). Naturally I don’t wish to be sacked, sued or assaulted, or to offend any individual or group as a result of what I might write – ok, except for George Bush, child abusers, racists, homophobes and bigots. You can all feel free to be as offended as you like, the more the better.

But I will continue writing my blog until I run out of things to say. And people who know me might appreciate that that day is some time away.

Why? Because they are crucial to driving forward their adoption.

Peter Kim recently did some research into Social Media Predictions for 2009 – here is his paper if you want to have a browse. Interestingly, there was little mention of these 3 areas but probably because it was more of a marketing and social paper than a technical “how to” guide.

But these areas are essential to delivering some of the changes predicted in that paper.

Firstly, html 5.

Though the standard is still in development, quite a bit of information has already been released about it. This article provides an excellent snapshot of what we can hopefully expect to see when the standard is finally delivered – and more importantly, supported by all browsers.

The new set of elements and attributes should go a long way to encouraging developers to produce more semantic, better structured html. And that’s essential for social media, mashups, RSS, enabling user-generated content on pages, providing better searchable blog entries and so on.

Three examples: HTML5 introduces a range of “structure” elements such as <footer>, <nav> and <aside>. This will greatly help developers mark up the content of their pages more accurately for use by search engines, content aggregators and social media tools.

Second example: HTML5 provides various elements for developers to use in place of the ubiquitous <object> element. New elements such as <video> and <audio> will enable developers to more accurately tag content so it can be more easily consumed by other sites, tools and so on.

I also read somewhere – though I can’t see it in the current draft standard – that an element will be provided to enable developers to mark up some content sections as being editable by users. If so, this should result in the explosion of user-generated content on all sorts of pages – basically, “instant” wiki pages. And potentially I guess make it possible for users to narrow searches by “user-generated” content.

Moving on to microformats. Though some may perhaps be replaced by new html 5 elements, microformats give developers the option to provide greater granularity when marking up their content.

This is all good stuff when it comes to making content more searchable and better able to be shared. Many people are probably already familiar with the geo tag for marking up location details of content so that it can be displayed for example of location-aware devices.

You can see some microformats in action if you install the Operator Firefox extension and look at any wordpress-driven blog including this one through the firefox browser. WordPress comes with the microformat rel-tag inbuilt so that whenever you add a post to a category, this microformat tag is populated.

If you’ve got the extension enabled, when looking at this post have a look at the toolbar and you will see “tagspaces” highlighted. Look at the drop-down list and you will see a list of sites that consume the tags on this post and let you search by them.

Microformats have huge potential for social media, next generation search and content sharing – once they become more widely adopted.

And finally, the 3rd new friend – next generation search.

As .net predicts in this month’s issue, “google’s 10 blue links will soon be history”. This site gives examples of new, more relevant ways of searching.

If you have good content to film, of course. And that’s the problem with user-generated content. The web is filled with rubbish – videos of pets (like my first VADO production), pointless blogs (er….. moving right along),  inane comments and so on.

Its not that the technology isn’t there to support the creation of great user-generated content – the current version of WordPress truly means anyone can create and manage their own stuff these days. And the changes proposed with the new HTML 5 standard will make it even easier for webmasters to enable it on commercial sites.

Its all about what’s published. And has been ever since the web really took hold in the late 90′s. Back then the mantra was CONTENT IS KING and its still the same today.

The big difference is that in these web 2.0 days, the “content” in question is far more likely to be user-generated.

USER-GENERATED CONTENT IS KING. I predict that will be the emerging message for 2009.

And that presents interesting challenges but also opportunities for organisations that work to embrace user-generated content on their own platforms for commercial gain.

Just how exactly to make money from it.

It requires innovative thinking – the idea of simply building your own community and hoping users will populate it and stick around has proven to be difficult for all but niche organisations. And adding ratings and reviews tools to sites is also now so commonplace as not to provide commercial advantage anymore.

There are some good examples of using user-generated content in non commercial organisations such as change.org. But I’ve not seen that many on commercial sites.

However, ideas such as inviting guest bloggers to post (Jamie Oliver perhaps, on a cookery site), and encouraging user collaboration around producing a film script (e.g. which a tv site could then fund the production of) might be worth exploring.

Basically targeting certain users as content creators or guiding users as a group through creating content that an organisation can then add the final touches to, to monetarise.

Just a thought. Right, better get on with publishing my next bad video to YouTube.

When browsing for it, I accidentally discovered another “change” website. This one is change.org, calling itself a “social action network”.

The great thing about these two sites, beyond the excellent causes and issues they discuss, is the fact that the information flow is most definitely two-way. These sites are excellent examples of using web 2 tools for social change.

And not only are conversations and debates taking place among the site hosts and their visitors but in fact the sites themselves are also examples of what I would call “web theatre”.

By web theatre, I mean the following. It’s a well researched fact that the majority of visitors to web 2 – type sites (social networks, social tagging, microblogging and so on) tend to lurk rather than participate. That the participation by the “masses” is actually participation by “the few, watched by the masses”.

Clever site hosts can make the most of this level of participation to further communicate their messages to the masses, and this is what is being done in an excellent way by these two sites, especially change.gov.

Instead of pushing their messages blindly without allowing for open debate to take place on their turf (hence driving it to blogs etc where they have less influence) or when it does, simply ignoring it, the Obama team are sharing their ideas and plans and openly encouraging feedback, whether positive or not.

And responding to it. That’s the key to the “theatre” bit – performing with the few participants for the mass of lurkers.

On top of discussions and digg-like voting, they are also sharing information about the meetings they are having with outside groups. Even to the point of sharing agendas, presentations and so on. (Have a look at the “Your seat at the Table” section of the site).

If a new government can do this, imagine the opportunities available to other organisations. Greater collaboration with staff, customers, their community of visitors, greater participation in driving their agendas, greater transparency…. imagine.

And imagine how worried the boards of various multinationals must be.

Back then, I think the media coverage was measured by how quickly organisations could update their web pages, capture and show film footage and photos, and locate people to interview. Blogs and YouTube weren’t yet mainstream, sure there were some newsgroups and forums but I suppose most people turned to the tv and other traditional media for their information.

Imagine if a similarly significant event happened today – using web 2.0 tools people could post updates on presence awareness tools such as twitter, send photos and videos from their mobile phones to flickr, youtube and so on, and share their feelings in social networking groups and blogs. And get newsfeeds on their mobiles.

News coverage would truly be by the masses. Our record of history would definitely be different – no longer just the “official” (read govt-endorsed, corporate funded) version of events but made up of real stories covered by real people who were in various ways a real part of the event. A social version.

A pretty big difference in a short amount of time.

Imagine back to other significant events, earlier in our world history – the end of world war 2, say.

And imagine how different the coverage and information sharing about future major events will be. Once mobile connectivity is more reliable.

Great for democracy, and more power to the people.

And it dawned on me that, unless I’ve missed something, the writers of Groundswell have made a bit of an assumption around customers and their use of web 2 tools.

Their book suggests that if you figure out who your target customers or users are, decide why you want to communicate with them (e.g. to get ideas from them for new products, to promote new services to them, etc), and then understand how these users make use of web 2.0 tools (ie. their “social technographic profiles”) – well then all you need to do is use these tools and magically customers will communicate with you.

Except that they probably won’t.

The piece that seems to be missing is what Clay Shirky talks about in Here Comes Everybody. Its something he calls “Promise”. Another way of thinking of it is the “what’s in it for me” factor.

For example, just because an organisation has identified its target users as being “critics” (in Groundswell’s  social techno profile) – due to the fact that they tend to rate products and comment on blogs – doesn’t mean they will do this on matters of interest to the organisation.

Forrester charges for access to its detailed information on social technographic profiles but I wonder whether the info considers this dimension – not so much exactly which groups use what web 2.0 tools but also what they talk about when using them. WHY they choose to use them. The “what’s in it for me” element.

Maybe I’ll find out by the end of the book.

And interestingly, in France its the opposite: 21% read blogs and only 3% visit social networking sites. For  organisations trying to tap into the conversations their customers are having online, its important to know this.

In  Groundswell, the writers have defined categories of people (inactives, spectators, joiners, collectors, critics and creators) based on what they do in the web 2 world. They’ve called it the Social Technographics Ladder.

They’ve then conducted surveys to profile different demographic groups across this ladder. Here are their results.

So what are the things that people do that puts them into one of these groups?

Well, Forrester suggests:

Its crucial for organisations to understand the categories their core customers fall into if they want to develop  a successful social media strategy. For example, there’s no point setting up a facebook group if their target customers are “spectators”.

Its not the only thing that drives a successful social media strategy but its a key starting point.