Companies drowning in information
A recent survey of IT professionals revealsed that 40% of companies do not have an information strategy in place (source: Farrugia Leo Research and Consultancy, on behalf of VNU Business Publications).
More encouraging, however, was the observation that Web2.0 meshing technologies are on the increase, with 13% of respondents using wikis to communicate internally with colleagues, and 7% using blogs. A lower proportion use these tools to communicate externally, with 4% using wikis and 8% using blogs to communicate with customers.
There’s no doubt that the two way communication of meshing technologies will become central to new economy businesses. If you want to find out how, you should attend a free seminar on business blogging which we are running next week. At the seminar participants will:
- Learn how to create effective blogging strategies and policies
- Hear case studies from specific industries
- See the latest blogging technologies demonstrated, including RSS and podcasting
- Have specific business blogging questions addressed in our Q&A session
Meshing: the new social order
I recently critiqued the term social networking as being rather inadequate for describing the phenomena of Web2.0 sites like MySpace and YouTube, that facilitate social interaction online. Doug Floyd challenged me to coin a new term.
It’s got to be meshing. Web2.0 applications are often mash-ups, so there’s a nice pun, but meshing encapsulates three concepts neatly:
Firstly, social network sites enable individuals without prior relationships to mesh.
Secondly, there’s a sense in which Web2.0 sites enable society to mesh with technology - the multi-layered communication of MySpace offers relationships and interactions which are unique to the online world, as well as supporting and moulding offline relationships.
Thirdly, a mesh is something that’s created by the convergence of more than one object, meshing sites create something new and powerful.
Social networking = Web 2.0
David Card of Jupiter Research reckons that “social networking is a feature, not a business”. And that MySpace is a youth portal, and that YouTube is a media company.
Card is sort of right, social networking is not the defining feature of these sites, but it does enable the core functionality to have currency, and in Gladwell’s terminology, enables these sites to achieve the tipping point more quickly.
I dislike the term ’social network’, it sounds to wishy-washy. It also misses the point, web2.0, is a collection of technologies that enables us to move real world relationships online, and sites that broker these transactions are the new economy.
Domain Name Dispute Resolution
Periodically, have the miserable experience of inadvertently losing a domain, or a very similar domain, to a cybersquatters. Cybersquatters register domains that should rightly only be registered by the original trademark holder. It’s amazing how many big brand companies don’t police international domains properly (e.g. www.nike.tv) .
The cybersquatter will hope to make money in two ways. Firstly, they’ll run a Google Adsense campaign, or a similar pay per click advertising scheme. Usually, the site will be very similar to your domain, so will benefit from traffic that should be coming to your site. Visitors will click an adword to move on, and the cybersquatter earns revenue. Secondly, and even more deviously, the squatter will wait until he receives a call from you, and he’ll offer to sell the domain at a vastly inflated price.
Avoid the auction scenario at all costs. The next stage is to use the services of a Domain Name Dispute Resolution Service; and you’ll have one or two areas to work on with them:
1. If you can demonstrate the existence of a local trademark, you should be able to successfully obtain the domain.
OR
2. You can demonstrate “Bad faith registration and/or use”. With cybersquatters this is fairly easy.
(Full details of the domain name dispute resolution policy here)
A resolution service provider such as WIPO, will provide a panelist ($1500 for one panelist, $4000 for three panelists), who will then make a ruling on the domain.