For much of this year I have been learning the ins & outs of this whole Web 2.0 social media thing. I have blogs, accounts with Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn, and for years have been a podcast enthusiast. The attraction for me is being an active participant as well as an interested observer of how communication is evolving.
Fascinating how text-oriented people have become in how they communicate. From phone-based texting, to reading and writing blogs, to the little snippet updates on Facebook or Twitter, text is becoming an overwhelmingly popular way to communicate. For me, I find myself having to be very selective of what I choose to read because there is just so much out there. Information overload is a constant battle for me – a guy who has an enormous appetite for information. No wonder the older set pushes back so vehemently on technology. My parents read the paper every day and watched the evening news and that was about it. Now data is coming at us in a constant stream and finding ways to sift through it seems to be where the magic is. This brings me to web search…
Google is the dominant player in Search (~60% market share compared to Yahoo at ~25% and Microsoft at ~15%). They have some very interesting initiatives going on that from a sociological perspective is fascinating. Things like offering free 411 directory assistance inquiries so they can document both who people want to call and to record their voice with accent and dialect to build a database for future voice recognition use. Their idea is to simply offer the free 411 instead of paying for access to someone else’s data. Google wanting to build their own body of data and not even paying for it is genius.
So I am paying close attention to the trendsetters like Google and like Facebook to try and glimpse the genesis of this social mediarevolution as its unfolding before our very eyes. Marketing has always intrigued me but within the past year or so the entire landscape has been changing rapidly. Web users accepting the ubiquitous sponsorship/advertisements that seem to tag every part of every page (some much more than others) as a necessary component.
On the web you really don’t get something for nothing as videos are either wrapped in an advertisement or perhaps even begin with a 15 second commercial that can’t be skipped. Links are usually sponsored so click-throughs are measured and counted so someone in the sky pays and gets paid. This is all now universally accepted as par for the course, meanwhile people using their DVR/TiVo setups at home usually skip commercial breaks rendering that method of promotion nearly obsolete. Very interesting indeed to see all this play out. For me, I prefer ride-along ads over obtrusive, older methods. It’s less inconvenient and frankly more clever.