{"id":575,"date":"2010-09-26T21:02:04","date_gmt":"2010-09-26T21:02:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/foulder.wordpress.com\/?p=575"},"modified":"2010-09-26T21:02:04","modified_gmt":"2010-09-26T21:02:04","slug":"internet-social-media-volunteering-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hannes-jaehnert.de\/wordpress\/2010\/09\/26\/internet-social-media-volunteering-part-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"Internet, Social Media & Volunteering (Part II)"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the end of July I published the first part of my column about Internet, Social Media and Volunteering<\/em><\/a>. On one hand it is part of my preparations for the \u2018master class\u2019 session at 19<\/span>th<\/sup><\/span> Volonteurope Conference in Athens<\/span><\/a> this year. On the other hand it is also an approach to raise the interactivity even before the start of the conference.<\/span><\/span>
\nIn my last blogpost<\/a> I tried to describe the history of the Internet since the first really usable computers in 1957. I ended with the web interface \u201cWorld Wide Web\u201d as the Internet we know today. In this current post, which affiliates to the first one, I\u2019ll try to explain (1st<\/sup>) what happened in the later 1990th<\/sup> until the early 21th<\/sup> century, (2nd<\/sup>) the rise of the so called \u201cWeb 2.0\u201d and the term \u201cSocial Media\u201d and (3rd<\/sup>) some basic standards in the field of Social Media.<\/span><\/span>
\n(1<\/strong><\/em>st<\/strong><\/em><\/sup>) Web 1.0 and its big crash: <\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/span>
\nAt the end of my last post I pointed out that the World Wide Web was seen as the next big market place. Especially the technical development of graphical interfaces, that allows more than a cryptic flow of information as we know from films like The Matrix<\/a><\/span>, lays down the barriers for \u2018normal\u2019 users. With the very popular web browsers MOSAIC (1993)<\/a><\/span> and NETSCAPE (1995)<\/a><\/span> the Internet became more and more a mainstream medium. Users could get informed via the Internet easily and the idea of something like a virtual shopping mall without any barriers of time and space stimulates this so called New Economy.<\/em><\/span><\/span>
\nEveryone would take part in this development — everyone would get a piece of the pie: On one side there where many tradesmen who set up (once in a while crazy) business models, on the other side there where many private investors who wanted to earn money with the stocks of this businesses. Because of the scorching development and the very high stock quotas tradesmen could find venture capital investors for business models like selling e-mail ads to consumers — businesses that never sell anything. All in one the New Economy wasn\u2019t a consumer based market. It was a phenomenon of the financial economy that got inflated like a soap bubble and even burst like it. The graph below shows the development of the NASDAQ<\/a><\/span>, the biggest American stock exchange for those electronic businesses.<\/span><\/span>
\n\"\"
\n<\/span><\/span>
\nAfter the dotcom-bubble burst in 2000 many businesses disappear until 2001. Only a few start-ups from the New Economy survive. Start-ups like Google (founded in 1998) and Amazon (founded in 1994) that really offer a value to their users. But what<\/em> was the value these services offer to their users? Why did they survive the big crash of the New Economy?<\/span><\/span>
\nFor Google we find the answer in the nearly exponential rising of the WWW (remember the graph at the end of my last post<\/a><\/span>). If it was possible that users could get informed while surfing through the early WWW and clicking from one site to another now they have to search for information they\u2019re interested in. With the PageRank<\/a> Google offers the first search engine that afforded really usable search findings. (The Pulizer Prize winner David A. Vise wrote down the whole amazing story of Google.Inc<\/a><\/span> in 2005) But what\u2019s about Amazon? In contrast to Googles PageRank a bookshop was really not a new invention. Actually Amazon seems to be the result of the New Economy and it’s thinking of the Internet as something like a virtual shopping mall. <\/em><\/span><\/span>
\nSure: primarily Amazon is a bookshop. The major difference is the great variety of books Amazon offers, and the way it sells them. First of all: Amazon uses their advantage that they don\u2019t really have to store all the stuff they sell. In contrast to the bookshop around the corner online bookshops like Amazon are able sell special books and niche products they could order if someone ask for them. Because Amazon is the biggest player in that market they earn money with an effect named \u201cLong Tail<\/a>\u201d. The embedded video shows a lecture by Chris Anderson<\/a> about the Long Tail from 2006.<\/span><\/span>
\n[youtube=http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=0Yku0GTrcuw]\nThe other value that Amazon offers, are the ratings, descriptions and comments from their users. On one hand user references are more reliable than ordinary ads sended by the companies that earn the money. On the other hand the advertisement for the niche products they sell is simply not lucrative.<\/span><\/span>
\n\"\"
\n<\/span><\/span>
\nTaking Amazon as an example I think we can point out, that only those services survived that offer real values to their consumers and users. Amazon used the advantages of the web strategically and created values that are only imaginable with web technologies. Even if we won\u2019t earn money with our web services in the way Amazon do it, we have to keep that in mind. In view of the still rising number of web services, private homepages, blogs and social networks we shouldn\u2019t step into this field without a strategy that present unique values to the users.<\/span><\/span>
\n(2<\/strong><\/em>nd<\/strong><\/em><\/sup>) Web 2.0 and Social Media <\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/span>
\nBut what exactly means \u201cWeb 2.0\u201d? At the end of my first blogpost<\/a><\/span> I wrote about the \u2018social part of the Internet\u2019 that exists next to all the others like e-mailing or shopping and information sites. The Web 2.0 is not about a further development of the Internet as a technology. Protocols like the TCP\/IP and decentralised data are still the core of the Internet — and equally the core of the Web 2.0. Actually the term Web 2.0 is nothing more than an advertising phrase that means a new way to use and develop the existing Internet technologies.<\/span><\/span>
\nTim O\u2019Reilly<\/a><\/span> — whom ascribed the invention of this term — published a very popular article about \u201cWhat is Web 2.0<\/a><\/span>\u201d in 2005 (it also got translated in several languages). In his article he pointed out several transformations from the Web 1.0 to the Web 2.0. For example, the transformation from the information cannel Internet to the Web 2.0 as a daily (working) platform, the transformation from expert knowledge to crowd intelligence and the transformation of the relation between technology and processed data.<\/span><\/span>
\nTim O\u2019Reilly shows in his article that the usage of the Internet has changed after the burst of the dotcom bubble. (I described above.) Unfortunately there is not really more inside this article — especially because the differences between the Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 don\u2019t get really clear. Private homepages e.g. where used as diaries even before the term \u201cweblog\u201d came up and Sir Tim Berners-Lee\u2019s<\/a><\/span> WorldWideWeb-Broser<\/a><\/span> (the first browser developed by the father of the Internet himself) allows its users to edit the web even before the term \u201cproduser\u201d was invented.<\/span><\/span>
\nWhat after all really makes a difference between the Internet before and the Internet after the millennium is the range of Social Media that increase every year. If an editor of the early WWW needed a lot of knowledge about HTML an editor of the Wikipedia or even a blogger like me don\u2019t need to know about <table>, <border>, <head> or <body>. The usability of web services like the Wikipedia and blog software like WordPress got much easier in bygone years. Everyone can use social software easily. Everyone can set up a weblog and start using Twitter or Facebook within 10 minutes. Everyone can use social software and take part in Social Media.<\/span><\/span>
\nSocial Media after all allows us to take part and face its development not only as users but also as producers (\u201cproduser\u201d). But since I asked above, what “Web2.0” exactly means, I also have to ask what the exact meaning of “Social Media” would be. If we\u2019re stickler for the term Social Media it seems to be a tautology. Because every social act is about communication every media we use to communicate have to be social. According to Social Media there\u2019re two reasons to use the term anyhow (following Stefan M\u00fcnker 2009<\/a><\/span>):<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n