I have described some of the main features of modern web 2.0 websites below. However, there is an excellent article about blogs and web 2.0 on the wordpress website.
What is Web 2.0?
Wikipedia.org describes Web 2.0 as:
“The term “Web 2.0″ refers to a perceived second generation of web development and design, that aim to facilitate communication, secure information sharing, interoperability, and collaboration on the World Wide Web. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities, hosted services, and applications; such as social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies.”
Read this article by O’Reilly What is Web 2.0?
About blogs
Wikipedia.org defines a blog as:
“Ablog is a website usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.”
An example of a blog is www.leaderlistens.com
Trackbacks and Links
Linkation. Linkation. Linkation. A major part of driving traffic to a blog is the use of links and trackbacks. Use multiple links when writing a blog post to add context to words. Linking to another blog post from within the text of your own blog post will send a trackback to the blog you are referencing. Think of a trackback as a message informing a blogger whenever anyone links to their blog. Many bloggers will take a look at any websites or blogs that link to them. They may then comment on your blog. This drives traffic and builds a community around your subject.
Google juice
Think about the words you use when writing your blog. Everything that goes onto the web becomes searchable by google and many other serch engines and bots. Think of the title of a blog post as a search phrase in google. So optimise your blog title for google if you can. To go hand in hand with this, the actual content of the text works the same way. So use particular phrases and words that you think will be popular for people to try and find you. Being specific is a great way of “owning a subject”. If you write about a subject, you will very quickly be an authority on that subject online.
RSS and syndication
A major part of modern websites is the ability to syndicate the content. RRS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is the basis of easily distributing and gathering online content. This is simply an XML file or text file that follows a particular standard and is represented generally by the following icon:
This indicates there is a web address you get when you click the feed icon. This web address can then be used in Blog readers like Google Reader or iGoogle, widgets to populate content on your blog, to combine with other feeds for custom content feeds or whatever tools you decide to use .
Guidelines for Collaborating Online
Recently the US Air Force published a Rules of Engagement document that is an excellent resource for deciding how to collaborate online in the various types of websites like forums and blogs. This document has been widely praised by the online community and also, true to web 2.0 philosophy, USAF has responded to online comments and made adjustments to the document. So it is an evolving document. The original link is here.
While a lot of this information is common sense, this document is an excellent decision maker for dealing with the various types of situations and could help Barnet to shape their own online operating procedures.
Generating Online Activity
Always start with a blog post
Use the blog post to introduce the subject and link to the areas of importance like events on upcoming, facebook group, etc. Have a call to action. Always link back to this blog post when making comments in forums and other blogs and email campaigns.
Post the Information Everywhere
Use as many syndication services as possible to spread the word. Take a look at the list of services you should know or use. Use the facebook and twitter accounts and cross post links throughout.
Create a fad
People respond well to a fad or a craze inviting them to submit comments, photos or videos along a theme. Typically a fad is quite short lived.
Encourage photo submissions with a theme or topic – e.g. My favourite …, Christmas lights photos etc
Syndicate content in as many places as possible: upcoming, facebook, blog etc
Mix with in person events
Hold an in person event. Advertise live feeds of the event, video, images or blogs/twitter.
Encourage photos, videos or blogs to be submitted after the event.
Services you should know about or use
Delicious.com
Flickr.com
Upcoming.yahoo.com
Google Alerts – monitor keywords like: Barnet, Barnet Council etc
PBWiki.com
