What the heck is Web 2.0 and what do I do with it?

by James Fowler
www.mywebsource1.com

What is the deal with Web 2.0? If you have heard about it, you are in the minority. According to Entrepreneur Magazine (Feb. 2007), 79% of all marketers are unfamiliar with the term, while only 33% of them are using it to their advantage. This means if you took 100 marketers, only 21 even know what the term means and only 7 know what to do with it!

But what is Web 2.0?

It is an interactive way for people to target, communicate, and collaborate. With Web 2.0, you no longer tell people, you share with them and receive their feedback. They, in turn, can share with the world about you. The whole world is moving towards this whether they know it or not. If you are reading this, you are using Web 2.0. This is a blog and it is a form of 2.0.

Everything is going 2.0. The way you access the internet, your email, even programs you use on a daily basis have all been transformed over to this new way riding the ethereal superhighway. I will give you some examples. Maybe you have heard of them.

Blog: You can put up a web page (because that is what it is) on a service like mySpace, Blogger, Xanga, or Wordpad. You can post your thoughts and people can respond to you. Find someone you like to talk to, make them one of your friends. Share pictures, videos, and audio. People write back to you and comment on what you say.

Wiki: Create a dialogue about your products and the info. People comment on the products and services, giving their thoughts and editing them in real time.

Video: Heard of YouTube? It is a format for you to upload videos from your web cam, video camera, or cell phone. People vote on the video, make comments, and create keywords for other to find it. Does this sound frivolous? Where else can you produce a commercial for nothing, run the commercial, see if it is successful and if not, change it and run it again?

Audio: Podcasts (and their video counterpart Vodcasts) are making the internet airwaves free. Businesses can now create an audio file from a microphone purchased from Radio Shack and you are set up to produce your own thirty minute infomercial or talk show.

Syndication: RSS feeds – or Really Simple Syndication – allows for you to take your blog and broadcast it all over the world with the click of a button. That's one big soapbox!

Word Processing: What? You mean like Microsoft Word or Excel? Yup. I mean like Google Docs and Spreadsheets (http://docs.google.com). It is a free service you can use with their free email service, Gmail. Do everything you can do in with the other programs, keep a document history (no need for 25 renditions saved to your desktop), work with another person online and then publish the final work to your web site or blog.

There are other ways to promote your web pages. Free services like del.icio.us (that's the web site name) allow you to take a web page, tag it by taking your keywords and then broadcasting the page like you would do with a blog.

Need a way of putting your whole site out there? Why not create a free portal (called a lens) at Squidoo.com. This helps people create a hand-built catalog of what they want online and then share it with others. One lens links in with a blog, a feed, a photo, an auction, and it all is under the umbrella of the topic you choose. Broadcast it and let other people find out info from you. This is relatively new, but it is the wave of the future. A lens stops the need for you to type in a topic and find 100 million irrelevant web pages before finding the one you need.

The Future of Web 2.0

As you can see, there are a lot of opportunities for a business to take advantage of Web 2.0. This is the time for you to use 2.0 to your advantage. For the most part, early in the game, these methods are free or cost very little to implement. There is no question that they will have a serious impact on how we do business in the future. The evolution of 2.0 has begun. You can't afford to get left in its' wake.