New Trends on the Internet

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New Trends on the Internet
Stan Reid Chief Information Officer Texas
Association of Counties
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Evolving Trends

• The Web as a platform
• Data as the driving force and User-controlled
  data
• Services, not packaged software
• Architecture of participation
• Harnessing collective intelligence
• The transition of web-sites from isolated
  information silos to sources of content and
  functionality
• open communication, decentralization of
  authority, freedom to share and re-use, and "the
  market as a conversation"

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Some of the Pieces

• RSS
• Blogs
• Viral Marketing
• Wikis
• Blokis
• YouTube
• MySpace
• MMOG
• GIS
• Semantic Web

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RSS

• Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)
• a family of web feed formats used to publish
  frequently updated digital content, such as
  blogs, news feeds, wikis, blikis, or podcasts.
• the user 'subscribes' to a feed by supplying to
  their reader a link to the feed the reader can
  then check the user's subscribed feeds to see if
  any of those feeds have new content

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BLOGs (Web Log)

• Similar to an online diary
• Challenging traditional media
• total number of blogs estimated at over 56
  million, with over 1.2 million posts written
  daily.

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Trent Lott

• Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi
  made statements that some interpreted as
  pro-segregationist.
• Top media outlets buried Lott's remarks or
  ignored them altogether.
• Bloggers criticized Lott's comments so vigorously
  that public officials and the mainstream media
  eventually took notice.
• Lott resigned as majority leader, and last year
  he told The Christian Science Monitor that he was
  the "first pelt" of bloggers.

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Dan Rather

• At the height of the 2004 presidential campaign,
  bloggers targeted a CBS News report on Bush's
  National Guard record and provided evidence that
  the network based the story on phony military
  memorandums.
• Although CBS was reluctant to acknowledge the
  controversy, Dan Rather ultimately resigned as
  the evening news anchor.

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Mark Foley Scandal

• November 2005 Rep. Rodney Alexander (R-LA)
  receives e-mails from page. Parents dont want to
  pursue it. The St. Petersburg Times and the Miami
  Herald, and the Fox News Channel acquired copies
  of the e-mails.
• May 2006 -- Ken Silverstein, an editor at
  Harper's Magazine, received copies of the five
  e-mails. July 2006, a Republican Congressional
  staffer sent copies of the e-mails to several
  Washington media organizations through an
  intermediary.
• August 2006 -- ABC News reporter Brian Ross
  received copies of the e-mails.
• September 24, 2006 -- e-mails appear on the
  anonymous blog, Stop Sex Predators.
• September 27, 2006 -- The blog Wonkette drew
  readers' attention to the posted e-mails.
• Sept. 28, 2006 Ross reported on the e-mails in
  the Blotter. After that initial story, two former
  pages brought copies of more explicit instant
  messages to ABC News and the Washington Post.
• Sept. 29, 2006 -- Shortly after being questioned
  by ABC about the more explicit IMs -- and before
  they had been publicly revealed -- Foley resigned
  from Congress.

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• Big stories die or are forgotten.
• Bloggers stay with the story.

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Congress, Legislature and most importantly
staffers, read blogs.
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Political Campaigns

• Blogs were used as a political tool during the
  2004 campaign. The "netroots" of the Left rallied
  around Howard Dean and unexpectedly pushed him to
  early front-runner status in the Democratic
  presidential race and later helped Dean win the
  chairmanship of the Democratic National
  Committee.
• The netroots have raised hundreds of thousands of
  dollars for Democrats in some congressional
  districts
• In South Dakota, Republican bloggers Jon Lauck
  and Jason Van Beek were credited with aiding John
  Thune's victory over Senate Minority Leader Tom
  Daschle. Thune's campaign reportedly paid both
  bloggers, and Thune later hired Van Beek as a
  Senate aide.

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Viral Marketing

• Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to
  marketing techniques that use pre-existing social
  networks to produce increases in brand awareness,
  through self-replicating viral processes,
  analogous to the spread of pathological and
  computer viruses.
• Counts on people passing on and shareing
  interesting and entertaining content. These viral
  commercials often take the form of funny video
  clips, or interactive Flash games, an advergame,
  images, and even text.

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Wikis

• a website that allows the visitors themselves to
  easily add, remove, and otherwise edit and change
  available content -- typically without the need
  for registration.
• an effective tool for mass collaborative
  endeavors.

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Bloki

• a WikiLog, Wog, WikiWeblog, Wikiblog, or Bloki,
  is a blog with wiki support. This means that
  after (or before) an article is posted to the
  blog, it can be edited, either by anyone or by
  some group of authorized users.
• The main advantage is in leveraging the utility
  of wikis at making connections between ideas --
  this effectively turning blog posts into proper
  wiki articles while maintaining the former's
  immediate nature.
• A bliki can evolve as a whole over time, and past
  information is not merely jettisoned into the
  aether and lost in the shuffle.

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YouTube
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Senator George Allen

•  
• Allen twice used the word macaca to refer to S.R.
  Sidarth, who was filming the event as a "tracker"
  for the opposing Webb campaign. Sidarth is of
  Indian ancestry, but was born and raised in
  Fairfax County, Virginia. Macaca is a slur
  meaning "monkey."
• the Allen macaca video generated over 400,000
  hits, so in an election that Jim Webb won by
  fewer than 9,000 votes, the video probably did
  matter. 
• Macaca Video

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Senator Burns

• Montana Senator Burns was caught on video several
  times saying that we should be worried
  about enemies who drive taxi cabs during the
  day and who kill at night.  Burns was also
  caught nearly falling asleep during an
  agricultural committee hearing.
• Taxi Cab Drivers
• Naptime

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http//www.youtube.com/watch?v43WQJ5gu96g
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MySpace
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MMOG or MMO

• A Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG or MMO)
  is a computer game which is capable of supporting
  hundreds or thousands of players simultaneously,
  and is played on the Internet.
• Second Life (abbreviated SL) is an online virtual
  world, which came to international attention in
  late 2006 and early 2007. Subscription-based
  users interact with other users through avatars
  providing an advanced social network service.
  Users who often called "Residents" amongst
  themselves explore, meet other users, participate
  in individual and group activities or "events",
  buy items, virtual property and services from one
  another, and, if they decide to visit often, they
  learn new skills and mature socially in climbing
  a virtual hierarchy.
• SL's virtual currency otherwise known as Linden
  Dollars is exchangeable for US and has become
  the subject of much concern in economic circles
  in regard to possible taxation5.

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GIS

• Geographic Information Systems
• Its not just about maps anymore.
• Of course, it never was.

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The Semantic Web

• The Semantic Web is a project to create a
  universal medium for information exchange by
  putting documents with computer-processable
  meaning (semantics) on the World Wide Web.
• Data integration across application,
  organizational boundaries

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• Humans are capable of using the Web to carry out
  tasks. However, a computer cannot accomplish the
  same tasks without human direction because web
  pages are designed to be read by people, not
  machines.
• The semantic web is a vision of web pages that
  are understandable by computers, so that they can
  search websites and perform actions in a
  standardized way.

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The Vision

• I have a dream for the Web in which computers
  become capable of analyzing all the data on the
  Web the content, links, and transactions
  between people and computers. A Semantic Web,
  which should make this possible, has yet to
  emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day
  mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily
  lives will be handled by machines talking to
  machines. The intelligent agents people have
  touted for ages will finally materialize.
• Tim Berners-Lee, 1999

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New Technology Old Patterns

• Its about communication
• Its about information
• Its about association
• The technology is evolving
• Society will evolve with it
• Changing Rules of Engagement

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New Trends on the Internet
Stan Reid Chief Information Officer Texas
Association of Counties