See What’s Out There

When Time Magazine cynically said “you” are the person of the year, this was probably the first time many people had any inkling of this thing we call Web 2.0. The web is no longer what it once was — a brochure, linked to other brochures. It has become a world where consumers are publishers and even the simple act of visiting a web page becomes an act of publishing - by increasing the popularity of an article which is then reflected in it’s position on a page, or by adding your profile to a list of visitors (see the recent readers section of this blog in the bottom right side of the page).

This Web 2.0 revolution has been made possible by technology that separates content from how it’s displayed. A simple case of this is the “print version” of an article at CNN.com or any other site. The print version isn’t another version at all, its the same exact content being pushed into a different style sheet. Take that concept further and you have the phenomenon of widgets and embeddable media players. In other words, if I can push the content into a style sheet on our own website, I can also push the content into a totally different form that can live anywhere on the web, or even on a desktop.

At See3 we believe that this Web 2.0 revolution is compelling because of another, less talked about revolution that has taken place at the same time — broadband. In the last two years we finally crossed the threshold of critical mass for broadband penetration, meaning that the web can finally have the kind of rich media integration we have talked about for a decade.

See3 works with organizations first to create compelling content with a focus on visual media - coming to engagements knowing that video content is driving increasing web usage. We then package this emotionally powerful media into portable toolkits that can be published a million times in a million different places. And we identify where to find the “influencers” by mapping the community of bloggers and websites written and read by people predisposed to care about our client’s issues. All of this work is in the context of the strategy to align organizational resources so that they will effectively and efficiently get people to act and care and donate.

Here’s a really nice intro to Web 2.0 concepts and development from Michael Wesch a professor at Kansas State University’s anthropology department.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 8th, 2007 at 10:27 am and is filed under Video, Nonprofits, Web Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.