Why are we all experimenting with Web 2.0?

Terry Hulbert 2.0Director of Business DevelopmentAmerican Institute of Physics

ASIDIC Fall 2008 MeetingSalem Waterfront Hotel, Salem, MA16 September, 2008

thulbert@aip.org

Introduction (1)

• Please do not be fooled by my British accent

• I will use The Queen’s English– niche, Luddite, jargon

• I am an evangelist– and I make no apologies for it

Introduction (2)

• What do the critics say?

• What are the Web 2.0 drivers?– some of the numbers

• Meta trend

• Context & illustrations

• My own thoughts

• Wrap-up

What do the critics say?

• It’s a fad– it’ll never catch on; it’s a distraction

• It’s for a whole other generation

• It doesn’t translate to the scientific or academic research world

• Who’s making any money from all this?– massive experimentation; is that a

coincidence?

Web 2.0 market drivers (1)

• Global growth:– 1 billion worldwide access– 845 million use it regularly– digital natives (<30)

• 88% online• 51% contribute content online

– China broadband growth rate – 79% during last three years

– world’s most popular blog is a Chinese blog

‘Web 2.0 Principles & Best Practices’, John Musser (2007, O’Reilly Media, Inc., ISBN 0-596-52769-1)

Web 2.0 market drivers (2)

• Customers are always-on– broadband usage approaching 50%

• as of March 2006, 42% of all Americans had high-speed, continuously connected broadband connections

• essential fabric of their daily lives• Broadband facilitates photo, video & audio

distribution (everyone’s a publisher)

Web 2.0 market drivers (3)

• Customers are connected everywhere they go

Web 2.0 market drivers (4)

• 2006Q1 – 2 billion global cell phone users (twice the PC internet population)

• 28% of users have accessed the Web from their cell phone

• Trend accelerating with more sophisticated devices

• Opportunities for location-aware applications

Web 2.0 market drivers (5)

• Customers are not just connected; they’re engaged too– increasingly comfortable & capable in creating

& contributing their own content• photo, video, audio, comments, product reviews,

personal & professional blogs

– at April 2006 >50 million blogs; 175k new each day

– top-10 social networking sites visited by ~45% of ALL internet users

Web 2.0 market drivers (6)

• On an average day:– 5m Americans create content via a blog– 4m share music files on P2P networks– 3m rate a person, product or service

What’s happening?

• Web is now finally becoming a true, read/write platform

• Mass media is increasingly challenged by UGC

• Technology is disrupting long-established industries

New social models

• UGC as valuable as traditional media

• Social networks form and grow with tremendous speed

• Truly global audiences are reached more easily

• Rich media is now part of everyday life (and expectations)

• Kent Anderson referred to ‘apomediation’

Meta trend

• Consumer experience in the Web 2.0 world is setting a new higher bar

• That knowledge and experience follows them into their workplace

• In turn, software vendors are incorporating Web 2.0 principles into their products & services.

Social networks (1)

• Consumer & collegiate social networks– what’s here moves to our space– MySpace, Facebook

• Professional social networks

• Enterprise networks– Intranet, extranet, partners, suppliers, etc.

Social networks (2)

• Knowledge sharing– benchmarking, how-to’s, etc. between peers

• Crowdsourcing– source collective knowledge and info to contribute

and produce e.g. citizen journalism

• Expert networks– legal services area, entrpreneurial area, e.g. Gerson

Lehman Group

• Professional networks– like LinkedIn, primarily job seeking, sales prospecting,

or ‘finding’

What do I mean by Web 2.0?

• Social networking, communities

• RSS, blogs, wikis…

• Mashups

• Tagging, folksonomies

• Utility, utility, utility,…

Incidentally,…

• 22% hiring managers review social network profiles

• 34% of those found material contentious enough to drop a candidate from consideration

• 24% found something that influenced them favourably(Research from CareerBuilder (via AllThingsDigital blog 11 sep 2008)

Mashups

• Just some examples

• Don’t care about scepticism

• Care about experimentation, innovation (and also utility)

Tagging & folksonomies

• 28% of Internet users tagged or categorised online content – photos, news, blogs

• And “on a typical day online, 7% of internet users say they tag or categorise online content”Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project, December 2006

2collab research

• >50% of respondents (1894) see social applications as “playing a key role in shaping nearly all aspects of research workflow” in the next 5 years– think about ManyEyes, dataviz, etc.

• >25% currently use social applications• 23% believe social applications will have a

‘major influence’ on grant application within the next 5 years

• >25% see them as major influence in the future for finding jobs

BioInformatics LLC research

• 77% of life scientists participate in some type of social media

• ~40% use social media for 1 or more hours per week

• ~50% saw blogs, discussion groups, online communities and social networking sites as “facilitating the sharing of ideas with colleagues and/or the community”

What are we trying to do?

• Create an architecture of participation

• Innovation – perpetual beta

• Rich user experience, beyond the traditional

• Software, features, etc beyond a single device

• Leveraging the ‘Long Tail’

Business models…hmmm

• Advertising based, sponsorship– 2Collab, BioMedExperts, Scintilla, Facebook, Digg,

Del.icio.us

• Subscription– Sermo, Community of Science (COS)

• Transactional– InnoCentive, IdeaConnection, Big Idea Group

• Blended– LinkedIn

• No-one has any answers…

Why?

• If we want to compete

• If we want to innovate

• If we want to be leaders

• If we want to position ourselves to exploit the one great idea

• If we want to attract new business and retain existing business

Summary (1)

• Easy for last 5,000 days !

• Cusp of truly exploiting Web 2.0…

• …and social networks, communities, etc.

• The next big thing is lots of little things– that’s features & granularity (the 2 M’s)

Summary (2)

• Jeff Baer – “continually evolving”

• Kathy Greenler Sexton – alluded to ‘fail fast & culture of failure’

• Brad Kain – ‘socialisation’ of the web

• David Durand – “experiment or die”

• Larry Schwartz – how could you not be enthused

• I urge you to defeat the politics

Summary (3)

• Why?– faith & hope– optimism– Inevitability

• Dave Freeman – – “We're going to the future. Do you want to

come along?”

Thank youAny questions?

Terry HulbertDirector of Business DevelopmentAmerican Institute of Physics

ASIDIC Fall 2008 MeetingSalem Waterfront Hotel, Salem, MA16 September, 2008

thulbert@aip.org

Experiment & innovate

• Using NEJM as an example…

Blogs

• Editorial blog• Corporate blog• Personal & professional blogs• Research blog, lab notes…?• Think: the election blogosphere as an

influencer; increasingly used in place of polls– Howard Dean Democratic presidential nomination

campaign (2004)– “Rathergate” – Killian documents controversy (2004)