DGC Blog

God help me because I can’t understand this WEB 2.0 gibberish! Oh wait Wayne MacPhail to the rescue. Problem solved. Wayne MacPhail is a producer of content more specifically online content. I didn’t actually get what his actual title was but you could say he’s on the good side of mankind. Social media was today’s topic which spilled over into concepts like tagging, bookmarking, RSS, and embedded code.

Whenever you think of something and a word jumps out let’s say bumble bee, you think yellow and black, fuzzy, stinger those words alone are tags which help identify itself. Bookmarking or social bookmarking as Wayne likes to put it and RSS allows a collective (you and I) to share information sort of like an Inbox for the web. Finally embedded code is quite simply the code equivalent to fast food. You pick it up and use it however you please but you can’t really have code fights unless you print them off and start throwing it at people. Think of all those paper cuts. Ouch!

Before I go completely off topic Wayne emphasized the importance of online social rules the key ones being awareness, education and involvement. Examples of this would be that users shouldn’t use social communities just to make a quick buck but to participate and help it grow. Another good one was that social media is a conversation and not a broadcast. You mainly want people interacting almost on the verge of personal involvement rather than being shot a clever marketing campaign claiming to be “with the times”.

The whole take away from Wayne was that real content is first created by the user and shared among friends and then it spreads like wild fire. Here are some links to get the revolution started:

http://www.mogulus.com/ (so cool I tried it myself)

http://www.facebook.com/ (horribly satisfying)

http://www.utterz.com/ (mobile future???)

http://www.flickr.com/ (for all you photo prostitutesJ)

http://wordpress.org/ (how could I not include this)