Same as it ever was? What makes today's web different...
One thing that keeps coming home to me is that even in the web industry, many people aren't grasping how the web is changing with the growth of social media.
The way that we discuss engaging with the web still sounds like planning for old media, a world of channels, hits and passive audiences of content consumers.
Apart from grasping concepts like the web being a conversational medium, about the shift from industrial to network media model, it's important for people who are serious about their business, brand or even personal profile online to consider what the explosion of social media, of the changes that are happening.
These are my top four at the moment:
1. Scale: unprecedented abundance of content being created and existing content, information and knowledge made instantly available, to millions of souls.
2. Speed: communications are frictionless, the barriers to finding and forming communities of interest are reduced almost to nothing. News can be published by almost anyone and be immediately available to the X billion people online in the world (including channel media who can relay itto the rest or anyone who wasn't listening).
3. Geography: language more than geography is the limiter online.
4. Democracy: the means of production and distribution of content are in the hands of anyone who can get access to a computer and an internet connection. That's a lot of people and will become an almost universal opportunity.
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