New Trends on the Internet

1. New Trends on the Internet Stan Reid Chief Information Officer Texas Association of Counties

2. Evolving Trends • The Web as a “platform” • Data as the driving force and User-controlled data • Services, not packaged software • Architecture of participation • Harnessing collective intelligence • The transition of web-sites from isolated information silos to sources of content and functionality • open communication, decentralization of authority, freedom to share and re-use, and "the market as a conversation"

7. Some of the Pieces • RSS • Blogs • Viral Marketing • Wikis • Blokis • YouTube • MySpace • MMOG • GIS • Semantic Web

8. RSS • Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0) • a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated digital content, such as blogs, news feeds, wikis, blikis, or podcasts. • the user 'subscribes' to a feed by supplying to their reader a link to the feed; the reader can then check the user's subscribed feeds to see if any of those feeds have new content

10. BLOGs (Web Log) • Similar to an online diary • Challenging traditional media • total number of blogs estimated at over 56 million, with over 1.2 million posts written daily.

14. Trent Lott • Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi made statements that some interpreted as pro-segregationist. • Top media outlets buried Lott's remarks or ignored them altogether. • Bloggers criticized Lott's comments so vigorously that public officials and the mainstream media eventually took notice. • Lott resigned as majority leader, and last year he told The Christian Science Monitor that he was the "first pelt" of bloggers.

15. Dan Rather • At the height of the 2004 presidential campaign, bloggers targeted a CBS News report on Bush's National Guard record and provided evidence that the network based the story on phony military memorandums. • Although CBS was reluctant to acknowledge the controversy, Dan Rather ultimately resigned as the evening news anchor.

16. Mark Foley Scandal • November 2005 – Rep. Rodney Alexander (R-LA) receives e-mails from page. Parents don’t want to pursue it. The St. Petersburg Times and the Miami Herald, and the Fox News Channel acquired copies of the e-mails. • May 2006 -- Ken Silverstein, an editor at Harper's Magazine, received copies of the five e-mails. July 2006, a Republican Congressional staffer sent copies of the e-mails to several Washington media organizations through an intermediary. • August 2006 -- ABC News reporter Brian Ross received copies of the e-mails. • September 24, 2006 -- e-mails appear on the anonymous blog, Stop Sex Predators. • September 27, 2006 -- The blog Wonkette drew readers' attention to the posted e-mails. • Sept. 28, 2006 – Ross reported on the e-mails in the Blotter. After that initial story, two former pages brought copies of more explicit instant messages to ABC News and the Washington Post. • Sept. 29, 2006 -- Shortly after being questioned by ABC about the more explicit IMs -- and before they had been publicly revealed -- Foley resigned from Congress.

17. Big stories die or are forgotten. • Bloggers stay with the story.

18. Congress, Legislature – and most importantly – staffers, read blogs.

20. Political Campaigns • Blogs were used as a political tool during the 2004 campaign. The "netroots" of the Left rallied around Howard Dean and unexpectedly pushed him to early front-runner status in the Democratic presidential race and later helped Dean win the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee. • The netroots have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Democrats in some congressional districts • In South Dakota, Republican bloggers Jon Lauck and Jason Van Beek were credited with aiding John Thune's victory over Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle. Thune's campaign reportedly paid both bloggers, and Thune later hired Van Beek as a Senate aide.

22. Viral Marketing • Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness, through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses. • Counts on people passing on and shareing interesting and entertaining content. These viral commercials often take the form of funny video clips, or interactive Flash games, an advergame, images, and even text.

23. Wikis • a website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove, and otherwise edit and change available content -- typically without the need for registration. • an effective tool for mass collaborative endeavors.

30. Bloki • a WikiLog, Wog, WikiWeblog, Wikiblog, or Bloki, is a blog with wiki support. This means that after (or before) an article is posted to the blog, it can be edited, either by anyone or by some group of authorized users. • The main advantage is in leveraging the utility of wikis at making connections between ideas -- this effectively turning blog posts into proper wiki articles while maintaining the former's immediate nature. • A bliki can evolve as a whole over time, and past information is not merely jettisoned into the aether and lost in the shuffle.

31. YouTube

33. Senator George Allen • Allen twice used the word macaca to refer to S.R. Sidarth, who was filming the event as a "tracker" for the opposing Webb campaign. Sidarth is of Indian ancestry, but was born and raised in Fairfax County, Virginia. Macaca is a slur meaning "monkey." • the Allen “macaca” video generated over 400,000 hits, so in an election that Jim Webb won by fewer than 9,000 votes, the video probably did matter.  Macaca Video

34. Senator Burns • Montana Senator Burns was caught on video several times saying that we should be worried about enemies “who drive taxi cabs during the day” and who kill at night.  Burns was also caught nearly falling asleep during an agricultural committee hearing. Taxi Cab Drivers Naptime

35. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43WQJ5gu96g

36. MySpace

43. MMOG or MMO • A Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG or MMO) is a computer game which is capable of supporting hundreds or thousands of players simultaneously, and is played on the Internet. • Second Life (abbreviated SL) is an online virtual world, which came to international attention in late 2006 and early 2007. Subscription-based users interact with other users through avatars providing an advanced social network service. Users who often called "Residents" amongst themselves explore, meet other users, participate in individual and group activities or "events", buy items, virtual property and services from one another, and, if they decide to visit often, they learn new skills and mature socially in climbing a virtual hierarchy. • SL's virtual currency otherwise known as Linden Dollars is exchangeable for US$ and has become the subject of much concern in economic circles in regard to possible taxation[5].

45. GIS • Geographic Information Systems • It’s not just about maps anymore. • Of course, it never was.