Earlier this year the Australian Government started talking about Gov 2.0 (as in Australian Government Web 2.0 Agenda). Back then I thought that it is an interesting concept and wondered how they were going to make it work when they cannot even make the eTax 2009 available for the Mac or online to be device independent.

So while the Australian Gov is trying to figure out this Web 2.0 business (hire me and I can tell you) the San Fancisco Gov has manage to absolutely kick butt. They have released the Open311 API.

So just to fill you in 311 is this great initiative by Govs world-wide to have a simple one-stop-shop for citizens to call. This means no 500 different numbers for the various departments and agencies, just one simple one. This can be done really well and really badly.

The Open311 API allows developers to create apps for the citizens to improve their interaction with the local gov. The example covers a situation where a developer could create an app which allows citizens to report pot holes. This app could be made very simple for the user. Using the camera of the phone the app could take the photo, use the GPS to pin-point the position, allow the user to input notes, capture masses of other statistics and open a new service request if one doesn’t exist. If the gov wanted to show citizens their progress they could provide the citizen with a personalised message at completion.

Benefit to the Government is that they

• save on having to constantly send assessors out for basic analyst,
• can capture trends,
• reduce calls to their contact centre,
• can connect with customers like never before
• citizens build the apps which they feel is needs i.e. user driven not gov driven, and
• it sends a clear progressive message to the voters.

So I have had a new idea to have a central hub for posting odd jobs and finding those jobs – and Cash in hand is the site for it. The concept is pretty simple: Have a website where people can post for a nominal fee odd jobs they need done around the house and people can than view the jobs and contact the person to do the job.

The idea is more about people who are just wanting to earn a little bit more cash when needed by doing odd jobs, not a site for people to find under the table work as the tax office might consider that illegal.

Please share your thoughts.

Coming up with a new domain name is usually quite difficult. You’ve got to come up with something catchy, memorable, and preferably short. Tool Names.com is a domain name generator with a difference. It uses a thesaurus to find related words to your site so you get a greater choice in choosing a domain prefect for your site. This domain name generator only produces .com top level domains. Try a few different combinations and see what you can come up with.

via Toolnames.com – .COM Domain Name Generator.

I recently have been build a Mortgage Calculator for Mortgage Corp Mortgage Home Loan Calculator. Loans are provided to users in real-time based on the information they provide. As the user provides more details the more refined the loans become. It is pretty cool and make use of some funky jQuery functions and AJAX. If you have a chance check it out.

Dale

Twitter

You want to post something to you Twitter account? For instance you might want your followers to know when your site has been used and what the result was e.g. you site might want to announce each time someone signs up for your service.

The answer is real easy, use cURL and PHP to update your profile. For RSS to Twitter we use the below script.

PHP to Twitter Script

To use the below script call the postToTwitter function with a 140 charter message (if it is over that Twitter will truncate it for you), the user-name (or email) you want to use and the password.

This article highlights some of the ways which a company could use Twitter in it workplace. I know with our site JobFeedr that we not only use Twitter as apart of our business model but as a way to respond to the community, post updates, and get advise.

Sourced From: The New York Times

Today we have a guest post by Sarah Milstein, a Web 2.0 consultant, on five ways to use Twitter in your career or in your business. — Marci

Posts from Twitter’s founder, Jack Dorsey

Twitter is a simple messaging service that you’ve either heard about a lot or not at all. Either way, it’s a fun and useful tool, well worth trying if you want to reach potential and existing customers, employees or employers.

Like blogging, Twitter lets you write messages that other people can read. Unlike blogging, Twitter limits your messages to 140 characters. (The previous two sentences absorbed exactly 140 characters.) Readers can choose to receive your Twitter updates (sometimes called “tweets”) on their phones, via IM, RSS or on the Web. The brevity, combined with the variety of delivery systems, make Twitter a powerful medium. Here are five ways to harness it:

1. Share ideas. Twitter is often called “micro-blogging,” and as with regular-size blogging, some people use it primarily to share personal information, while others use it for professional reasons.

If you’re interested in the professional possibilities, ignore the Twitter prompt, “What are you doing?” because frankly, the details of your day are banal to people who don’t know you (Proof: my Twitterstream). Instead, note cool work-related things you’ve discovered — a great article, a new Web site or an intriguing idea. Whenever possible, include a link (if it’s too long, use TinyURL to shorten it with one click).

Or share your knowledge. The lexicographer Erin McKean posts neologisms; a group of venture capitalists gives tips to entrepreneurs.

2. Show respect. Another way to share ideas — and your respect for other people in your field — is to “retweet” something interesting somebody else has Twittered. Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media (for which I’m co-writing a research report on Twitter), does this frequently and to great effect. Simply start your message with “Retweeting@username” and then paste in the original message (the @ symbol is the Twitter convention for responding or referring to other users).

3. Build your brand. Zappos, the online emporium known for outstanding customer service, encourages employees to Twitter and to respond to customers who also use the service — increasing the company’s reputation as a friendly place to shop and work. Notably, the chief executive of Zappos, Tony Hsieh, Twitters frequently. Because the company cultivates an un-corporate image, he’s the rare executive who can effectively post personal updates.

4. Engage customers. Run contests, solicit feedback and thank customers for supportive messages. Jetblue does all three. (By the way, JetBlue doesn’t identify the person or people who Twitter under its account, but best practices suggest you should.)

5. Provide customer service. Wesabe, a personal finance site, has long used Twitter to respond to complaints and to let customers know when it’s fixing problems. Comcast doesn’t post, but it does use Twitter to respond to customers who have complained about the company.

How do Comcast and Wesabe know customers are grousing? Twitter’s excellent search feature lets you learn what people are saying about any term — including you, your competitors or your industry. (Oddly, this search feature is different from the relatively useless one at the top of your own Twitter home page.) You can then respond to individuals — as Comcast and Wesabe do — with the @username trick.

Signing up for a Twitter account takes about 15 seconds. If you first want more detail on how the service works, check out the Wikipedia entry or the “Twitter in Plain English” video. Still on the fence? Chris Brogan has 50 good ideas for using Twitter in business.

Finally, no matter how you use it, remember that messages posted to Twitter — even updates you send by phone or IM — reside on the Web in perpetuity, where prospective employers and customers can find them. While 140 characters may not seem like much, they are enough to look unprofessional.

Source: MyCustomer

The ‘i’ economy: Web 2.0 for business in 2008 and beyond

05-Dec-2008

More people than ever are using the internet as a social networking platform and this has had enormous implications for business in 2008. But how many firms are actually doing anything about it and how many even know what to do about it? James Paterson explores this burgeoning area and provides some predictions for 2009.

By James Paterson, Plebble.com

According to the latest figures from the Office of National Statistics (released in August 2008), nearly every single British adult (93%) aged under 70 who have a degree or equivalent qualification now have access to the Internet in their home. Two-thirds of the all households in the UK have Internet access, a rise of more than 1.2 million since 2007. According to the same figures, 23.5 million adults in the UK (69% of the adult population) use the internet “every day or almost every day”.

What are these 23.5 million people doing every day?

The answer is that, more than ever, people are not only looking for information and content online (as they did during the early stages of mass adoption of the internet in the late 90s and early 2000s), they are now providing it – in the form of reviews, Facebook updates, photos on Flickr, videos on YouTube and blog posts about any subject imaginable, providing an unending commentary on their lives and the things they care about. This is the phenomenon known as ‘Web 2.0′, ’social media’ or ‘the social Web’, and 2008 proves it’s here to stay.

“22% of surveyed companies expressed clear dissatisfaction with Web 2.0 technologies, many saying they have stopped using them as a result.”

James Paterson, Plebble.com

The evidence for this is compelling: according to traffic-ranking website Alexa.com, Facebook is currently the second most visited site in the UK (after Google). An estimated 12.5% of the world’s internet users visited the site yesterday alone. It boasts 120 million active users worldwide – i.e. people who have actually logged into the site within the last 30 days. This is a huge increase from the 7.1 million registered users it had at the beginning of the year.

YouTube is currently the UK’s fifth most-visited site. Nearly 20% of the world’s internet users (264 million people) went on it yesterday.

Interestingly, Blogger.com, a leading blog provider, has become the 14th most visited site in the UK, showing how popular and mainstream blogging has become. An average of 146 million people in the world visit a blog hosted by either Blogger, Word Press or Live Journal each day. Current estimates put the number of blogs in the world at around 186 million, including around 73 million blogs in China. This is up from 70 million blogs at the beginning of the year.

Leading search engines such as Google and Yahoo and technology companies such as Microsoft are also getting in on the act, meaning that 9 of the top 10 most popular UK websites are now either exclusively or in part involved in their users providing content.

So, what does this mean?

Growth of the ‘i’ economy

These changes in the way consumers are using the internet, I would suggest, reflect (or perhaps indeed have caused) the beginnings of a fundamental shift in the dynamic between consumers and businesses. In being able to provide content and information to each other in free and easy-to-create and easy-to-understand formats, consumers are becoming increasingly less receptive to marketing messages being pushed onto them by businesses via ‘vertical’ communication media such as the press, TV, advertising and static Web 1.0 websites. Instead they are pulling information about companies, products and services, more often than not from the most trusted of all sources – each other.

This is the ‘i’ economy – ‘i’ not meaning information or internet, but ‘me’ – it’s all about me and those like me. An example might be helpful. Think of someone wanting to watch a film. The ‘i’ consumer probably no longer studies a film poster or even reads a review in the paper before doing so. He/she will visit a peer-review film site like RottenTomatoes.com, skim a relevant discussion forum and/or search for relevant blogs via Technorati to see what ‘real’ people think about it.

They might visit Wikipedia to find out more factual information and finally download it to their PC via a peer-to-peer file sharing system like BitTorrent or stream it from a site like Watch-movies.net rather than even going to the cinema. All this is a reality for many people in 2008 – and it’s all free, can be done within minutes and, importantly, is all peer-enabled.

What this means for your business

First, the ‘i’ economy is likely to represent an extremely serious assault on your business model, particularly if it in any way relies on providing paid-for content or information. If consumers can get content and information for free, why should they pay for it? But, if they are not paying for it, who will be able to afford to create quality content or host and disseminate reliable information? Google’s unaudited costs just for Q3 of 2008 were nearly US$4 billion. Much of this can be attributed to its vast data centres that index the web and seek to provide over 81% (1.2 billion) of the world’s internet users with reliable information.

I don’t pretend to have a solution to this complex problem. Google seems convinced that the answer lies in advertising – and it certainly seems to be working for them. However, advertising cannot in my view be an applicable revenue stream in every scenario. Perhaps this is something that will be addressed more fully in 2009.

Second, whatever your business, the ‘i’ economy will also have a dramatic effect on how you do business. As above, with consumers now exchanging increasing quantities of information, businesses can less and less hide behind expensive advertising campaigns and brand-building stunts when dealing with consumers. Thanks to price comparison sites, commoditised businesses in particular such as ISPs, mobile phone network operators, utilities providers, banks and insurance companies more than ever before need to ensure they offer competitive prices.

Customer service (one of the few key ways that commoditised businesses can distinguish themselves from competitors) is also firmly under the spotlight with ’service-comparison’ websites such as my own, Plebble.com. CSR and environmental credentials are also becoming easier for consumers to measure, compare and judge. Transparency is the new watch-word – in all aspects of your business.

But, as we reach the end of 2008, how many companies understand this?

Finding their feet

Many of you will probably have spent much of 2008 being told about the importance of transparency, flattening your organisational structures and engaging with consumers on a more peer-to-peer level. But, how many are actually doing anything about it? How many even know what to do about it? Which are the appropriate platforms? What is the appropriate etiquette? Where is the business case for it? As 2008 draws to a close, businesses’ adoption of Web 2.0 technologies and techniques is still piecemeal.

My evidence for this is part anecdotal and part-statistical. During the last month, I have had two separate conversations with high-level communications executives at a leading energy company and a leading telecoms company on this subject. Both acknowledged the clear change in consumer behaviour (outlined above) and their brand’s inevitable need to become more open and transparent as a result at some point in the future.

However, both said they are not ready to do so yet – they have as yet felt no business pressure to do so. In other words, they’ve felt no pain. When their P&L is directly hit by consumers who refuse to buy from a non-transparent, ‘vertically-minded’ company (which both acknowledged will happen soon), that is when their boards will insist on changing business practices – but will it be too late for them by then?

The issues surrounding businesses’ use of Web 2.0 technologies are also well illustrated in the second instalment of McKinsey’s Web 2.0 survey, released in the middle of 2008. This found that only about a third of surveyed companies used blogs, wikis, rss feeds, podcasts and social networking sites. This was an increase on 2007’s figures but only a modest one. The number of companies using peer-to-peer technologies has actually fallen from 37% in 2007 to 18% in 2008. 22% of surveyed companies expressed clear dissatisfaction with Web 2.0 technologies, many saying they have stopped using them as a result.

This may look bleak for proponents of Web 2.0 such as me, but it is important to remember that many Web 2.0 technologies are simply not intended for business use. Social networking, for example, is not a business application. It is, by its nature (and name) social. There is arguably no place for a brand in a social network. Who socialises with Coca Cola?

So, while it is gaining momentum (slowly), business adoption Web 2.0 is still in its infancy and businesses are finding their feet.

Some predictions for 2009…

What about predictions for 2009? I have three:

1. From the consumer side, we will see further moves towards the ‘i’ economy – peer-to-peer content and information sharing will become more important. The economic downturn may actually accelerate this as people look for cheaper alternatives and spend more time at home – online. Watch out too for discussions about VRM (vendor relationship management) – http://projectvrm.net/, arguably the ultimate embodiment of the ‘i’ economy.2. Brands that take the initiative on transparency in early 2009 – listening to what people are saying about them and (importantly) engaging back – will find themselves ahead of the curve and will gain a competitive advantage in so being. Brands that do not do so will start to feel pain as a direct result of others that are taking the initiative.
3. A lot of 2009 will be about platform choice for businesses – businesses finding Web 2.0 platforms that they can use, that give them a clear seat at the table and that have a good business case for their use.

2009 is going to be an interesting year.

James Paterson is co-founder of Plebble.com.

by Josh Catone

For a lot of people, the term “Web 2.0,” ceased to mean anything real a long a time ago. For some, it never really meant anything to begin with. As someone who writes about the so-called second version of the web for a living, I think I’ve held onto the Web 2.0 term as long as I could. But today, “Web 2.0? has officially jumped the shark for me. That doesn’t mean I’ll stop using it — as a blanket term to describe the industry that I write about it can be helpful — but I have to admit that it has now become somewhat of a parody.

Defining Web 2.0 has been something like a fun parlor game for a few years now. There’s a long history of people trying to come up with a unified definition of Web 2.0. But like the elusive theory of everything in physics, a single, agreed-upon definition of what Web 2.0 really means has been hard to come by.

Probably the most widely accepted definition is Tim O’Reilly’s compact definition: “Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as a platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.”

But even O’Reilly’s definition has changed and evolved to get to that point.

So what caused me to finally admit that Web 2.0 has jumped the shark? It was waking up today, and finding a link to this story at PC World, a very mainstream computer publication: Web 2.0 Tactics for Successful Job-Hunting.

Among the “Web 2.0 tactics” that PC World recommends: letters of recommendation, staying current with your skills, and networking. Isn’t that how people have been searching for jobs nearly forever? What the heck is “Web 2.0? about that? The only item on the list that could be even mildly considered to have some sort of tie in with what we generally like to think of as Web 2.0 was “Upgrade your online image,” in which the authors recommend joining relevant online social communities like LinkedIn, and Twitter, blogging, and making sure your profiles at other social sites are clean of college party photos.

In other words: Web 2.0 is now a mainstream marketing term. In reality, Web 2.0 has always been a marketing term. O’Reilly’s company, which owns the trademark on the term, uses it to promote their hugely successful web-focused conference series, for example. But until today, I hadn’t actually seen it applied in a way that so blatantly targets a mainstream audience in an effort to make something rather dull appear more hip (I’m sure it’s happened before, this was just the first time I’ve seen it).

All that said, the confusion over Web 2.0 — whatever it means and however it is now being used — has been helpful.

Last April, I wrote that there really is no such thing as Web 2.0, or Web 3.0 for that matter, there is just the web. “Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 — they don’t really exist. They’re just arbitrary numbers assigned to something that doesn’t really have versions,” I said. “But the discussion that those terms have prompted have been helpful, I think, in figuring out where the web is going and how we’re going to get there; and that’s what is important.”

I think that’s still true, and as long as we continue to have that discussion and attempt to define these nebulous ideas, we’ll continue to get value from the discussion. I wrote in April that instead of telling people I write about Web 2.0, I’d tell them that I “write about the web, what you can do with it now, and what you’ll be able to do with it in the future.” I haven’t done a very good job in keeping with that promise, but I still like the idea.