Bill's Notebook

Stowe Boyd promises three reasons why social networks are killing search but only delivers one.  But it is a big reason – lack of innovation in search technology.  I think that the increasing adoption of the semantic web will spur a new wave of innovation in search.  Maybe a merger of search and social media?

According to Forrester Research (thanks for the link from Read Write Web).  If you are responsible for government agency communications, you will want to look at Figure 1.  How is your agency’s social media strategy serving the various groups on that ladder?

This semester I am teaching an online class in political communication.  As I prepared the lectures, I read many articles on the rise of social media-fueled journalism and the corresponding decline of traditional journalism.  Personally, I believe that journalism is undergoing a good transition back to its past role as a public service.  And I believe that social media is the catalyst for this transformation.

Even so, I think that Will Thalheimer makes some great arguments for the other side of the issue.  He claims that the blogosphere only produces shallow reporting that will lead to poor information.  “Eventually, poor information will lead to poor decisions. Eventually the democracy implodes. Some may see signs of this already. Certainly, most of us would like our democracy to be doing a better job.”

This is an important debate because government depends greatly on the media to report what government does and how people are reacting to the government’s actions.

This was in my RSS reader but I didn’t get around to it until now.  Read the following and just imagine the implications for government in 2020:

“Toward Government 3.0

In the future, terms like socialization and commoditization as well as the founding principles of Open Government (transparency, participation and collaboration), will take a much broader meaning, as we face questions like:

• Should we allow people to package public services by composing basic services and information offered by an ecosystem of providers, only few of which would be government?
• Should we make operational data transparent and to what extent?
• Should we crowdsource real-time traffic management to car drivers and their devices?
• Will collaboration extend from citizen-to-government to consumer-device-to-government-infrastructure?
• Will government IT and OT applications run side by side with consumer applications (and share data) on what we call today the “public cloud”?

. . . it seems to me that the focus of almost all government 2.0 efforts today is on socializing data and commoditize some of the processes (e.g. government cloud computing initiatives).  To understand the deeper implications on participation and service delivery, we must open our minds to what “data” will mean in the future, and to how far socializing and commoditizing services and processes could lead us in a world where data from trillions of sources (people, institutions and devices) will be available to virtually every person and every device.

I am not sure we need a term like government 3.0 to conceptualize all this. However, if it helps us get passed the obsession with posting public data and developing social media policies, so be it. It is time to look at how the future will totally blur role, data, service and process boundaries as we know them.”

Great example of how to train employees in effective social media practices – Telstra’s 3Rs of Social Media Engagement.

Jack Vinson describes the real goal of knowledge management.  A much needed reminder after a day of discussing the use of online social networking tools.  It’s great to focus on the public but employees can also benefit from internal social networks.

David Armano of Logic+Emotion writes: “Stop looking for the next Twitter. Why? It’s simple—because the odds are you already have plenty of projects and ideas with proven potential that you need to improve on without worrying about the next thing you’ll start.“  Armano then goes on to list the four major tools that still have significant value: websites, blogs, intranets, and social community applications (Facebook, Ning, etc.).  It’s good advice because each of the tools bring different capabilities and assets to the overall communication infrastructure of an organization.  Better to have a full toolkit to choose from than just one tool to work with.

Thank goodness someone wrote a manual.

I received a Google Wave invite.  I haven’t started working with it yet but I plan to work through the examples.  From what I have read, I’m more inclined to believe that Wave is more hype than useful.  But I want to have an open mind and so will give it a good workout.

I understand Twitter technically but I was never sold on what was so revolutionary about it.  Calling it microblogging when it was really just a pale reflection of blogging never really seemed to explain it.  I’ve used it for events but every since I put the Facebook app on my phone, I use that instead.

Apparently, others are questioning Twitter’s utility because its traffic has stalled for the last four months and is declining.