10 Years Cluetrain Manifesto

Seems like a bit of a premonition about Web 2.0, which, besides AJAX, shiny logos, and apps developed on a lazy saturday afternoon in Ruby on Rails, is all about the social aspect of the internet. Although I'm kinda sure that other people (such as Berners-Lee) also noted the importance of the social web before this manifesto arrived.

I'm personally not confident that companies are actually using the social web like they should. Sure, a lot of companies have a blog, are on Twitter, LinkedIn, Second Life (*shudder*), Hyves and what-have-you, but from what I see of it, it's more of a 'hey look we're on here too, read our stuff' instead of 'Hey, we value your opinion and interaction with us'. My wording may be a bit poor, but the case stands: Companies are on Hyves, but do people interact with said companies through Hyves?

Let's take GX for example. You keep a blog on various topics, but (myself and perhaps two or three others) are pretty much the only ones that have left a comment on it and have, as such, interacted with it. With that in mind, the 'social' aspect of your weekly blogs is largely one-sided - you (and nothing personal to you personally btw, just GX in general, and not meant as criticism in your company's direction either) have something to say, say it, but it's not obvious how the community can interact with it.

A lot of blog posts I've seen end with a 'So what do u think???'-kinda statement, where people are invited to share their own experience on the topic at hand.

In a perfect socially-oriented / web 2.0 blog, the comments made by visitors are equally, if not more important than the blog post itself. I'm sure you (and all your colleagues) visit Tweakers.net on a regular basis, which is a pretty good example - the comments, if you filter out the first posts and other bollocks, add loads of information to the articles themselves, and allow the users to have some feedback on the article.

Next to that, T.net has a large section of user-generated content, the Pricewatch. I'm pretty sure that this is a large source of income for them, whilst they have relatively little work to invest into it - they made the software and keep an eye out, but let their visitors and companies supply the content. Youtube is the Ultimate Example for user-generated content, imho.

I have no clue what I was trying to say again with the above two paragraphs, but eh. The social aspect of a website is terribly important nowadays. I have a news website of sorts myself, which competes directly with a years-old site with a similar topic. Our website has a working forum and the ability to comment on articles, which the other one doesn't. The other one has the advantage of a good domain name, but in terms of social interaction (and content, but that's another story) they score a -1, which pretty much reduces them to a 'read once & gtfo'-site. In terms of website statistics, they get a lot of hits but few pageviews, whereas we get less hits but more pageviews and time spent on the site. When serving ads, pageviews and time spent on a site are more important than unique visitors.

Blargh, this should be a blog post itself, but eh. I'll stop now.