How would I spend 30 seconds in an elevator with a C-Suite executive talking about Web 2.0? This was is my task this morning: How can I convince somebody who may have read an article or heard some buzzwords and been to Wikipedia that they should come to me to discuss how they can benefit from employing some combination of blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, podcasts, or social networking software?
As I sat here at my dining room table with a miniature white board, I went through all the various ways that I’ve heard Web 2.0 described (or roughly sold) over the last years, including the ways that I’ve done; however, I was not quite satisfied with my previous thoughts on the subject. The latest formulation on the topic is reduced to three words: Speed, Agility, and Transparency. I’ve even managed to come up with a new(ish), buzzword-heavy sentence to sum it up in a cutesy way: Web 2.0 is the web’s adaptation to the ever-increasing speed of information.
From this, I seem to have settled on a new little marketing formulation, drawn from the darker side of the internet, warez: The Zero-Day Web. This helped to frame the way that I think about information over the course of my work day/week/month/year.
- 1 day information is old
- 1 week information is archived
- 1 month information is outdated
- 1 year information is history
Web 2.0–namely instant publication–is the way to make sure that information is out before its old, archived, outdated or even history. Put in the opposite way, traditional publishing is wholly unfit to serve the knowledge worker who is expected to be at the zero-day front of new information.
So you see, Mr. Executive, Web 2.0 technologies can equip your workforce with the tools they need to keep up with the data tsunami that threatens to overwhelm them everyday.
Oh. And most of the best Web 2.0 platforms are basically free.
Post Script: To me, it is rather unimportant that when I look at this post a year from now, I will probably laugh/mock/not want to read it because of how much of a part of my professional history it will have become. I know right now that I will think it ridiculously dated (as I feel about my first ever blog post, which is void of original thought and unfortunately on a protected intranet).
