Report: Most Aren’t Rushing Into Web 2.0

May 19th, 2007 by Cyn · 2 Comments

Report by David Needle issued 7 May 07 on internetnews.com

While most Americans are comfortable using the Internet, far fewer are ready to dive into the latest, more interactive Web services — sometimes described as Web 2.0… — such as creating blogs and posting personal videos…

…The survey found that 85 percent of American adults use the Internet or cell phones (and most use both), but the percentage of those who use the more advanced interactive tools for self-expression on the Internet is a measly eight percent.

For the full report, see http://www.internetnews.com/stats/article.php/3676241

Share This With:

Print This Post

Posted in Web 2
Tags: blogging, interactive Web, news, report, social networking, status, Web 2

2 responses so far ↓

1 eddie // Jun 16, 2007 at 12:40 pm

This article comes as no surprise to me. Although I find many Web 2.0 trends interesting and exciting, I haven’t been eager to adopt them all.

More than any other trend of the moment, I’m really enjoying social bookmarking and other aspects of moving toward platform independence. I recently imported my large collection of bookmarks to the deli.cio.us site, and I downloaded the deli.cio.us add-on for Firefox. So I no longer add bookmarks to my locally stored browser file. I keep a few essential ones, but for the most part, I now tag sites only for deli.cio.us and share the majority of my bookmarks there.

I’m also taking advantage of such innovative software as Google Apps, and I find myself moving away from client-based software wherever possible. This is part of my goal to become more platform-independent. Though I will continue to use Windows for my client-based work, I’ll be switching to the Mac in the coming months (after Leopard is released). I’ll run Windows on my Mac, too, but I’ll increasingly use Gmail, Google Docs and Spreadsheets (for simpler docs), and deli.cio.us as a core setup. I’ll continue to run Office for Windows but will use OpenOffice on the Mac.

I have been admittedly slower to develop an interest in wikis and blogs. I have had some experience posting on Wikipedia, but I haven’t really participated in a wiki-based, collaborative project. I’m open to the idea, though.

As for blogs, I like the way we’re using this one, and I can see that blogs are useful for topic-centered discussions. But I have no interested in the seemingly prevalent practice of online journaling. I rarely read journal-style blogs, and I have no interest in creating one.

Just my two cents…

Eddie
2 Carolyn Kelley Klinger // Jul 2, 2007 at 5:46 pm

Eddie, thanks for your comment to this article. Yours is this blog’s first comment!

One of the things that fascinates me about Web 2.0 is the variety of technologies it includes. Everyone seems to have a different favorite. I learned about many Web 2.0 technologies for the first time at Scott Abel’s presentation, “Web 2.0 and the Technical Communicator” at the STC Annual Conference in Minneapolis this past May. If you weren’t able to attend that session, you can hear a shorter version of it in the form of a podcast, another Web 2.0 technology.

When Cynthia Lockley, our chapter’s webmaster, and I first talked about creating this blog, we did hope to make it a forum for opinions, thinking that would be a way to engage our members. As we got further into it, however, we realized that to do that we would need to have daily, interesting content. Frankly, neither of us has the resources to make that happen. We came up with the current model, which is a forum for chapter news and announcements. Our chapter president emails weekly announcements to a large group of subscribers already and until we created the blog, there was no way to easily find the content of a past announcement. This blog allows authors to tag their posts, which makes them easily searchable. We also wondered if using this blog instead of a weekly email would be more effective in engaging the minds of our members and other interested people. So far we have not given up the weekly email and I don’t think any plans for doing so are in the cards.

If we really wanted to create an opinion-oriented blog, the prerequisite, it seems to me, would be that the chapter would need to have one. As a membership organization run by volunteers, we are a collection of many opinions and come together because of one commonality, our profession. As a chapter, we are in the business of including people, not excluding them because we don’t think alike. I think that this news and announcements model works better for us. When we do announce articles of interest, as Cynthia did when she posted this Web 2.0 article, comments like Eddie’s and mine are examples of how members can express their opinions on the topic.

Getting back to my comment about how everyone has their favorite Web 2.0 technology, I must admit that I follow about five journal or opinion blogs at least once a week. One of my favorites keeps me coming back because of the quality of the writing, humor, and links to interesting sites.

Does anyone out there use a wiki for collaborative work? I’d love to hear more about that. We have a couple of wikis that chapter volunteers created for their chapter work (newsletter and competitions), but they haven’t really taken off. I’d love to hear about ways to make these wikis useful tools.

Carolyn