Here’s my definition of Web 2.0:

Web 2.0 is, collectively, the technological responses to the rising social and commercial power of people on the Internet.

In my view, Web 2.0 is not really a technological phenomenon at all; it’s a social one, enabled by technology.

A key point: by “people,” I don’t mean clients or customers or users or stakeholders or shareholders or developers or any of the other web business categories into which people are habitually bucketed.

I just mean people — and while that covers a lot of ground, there are a few things you can safely say about most people:

• People like to be treated with respect
• People don’t like figuring out what should be obvious
• People make decisions emotionally, not rationally
• People are social animals. They like other people, and they depend on them to help make decisions.

Software that responds to these characteristics — a truthful ethos, easy to use, fun to use, with flexible interactivity that gives them a sense of what other people are doing — might well be called Web 2.0 software.

The idea of putting people first isn’t new — Tara Hunt’s writings on pinko marketing are only the latest iterations of the Cluetrain Manifesto, and they have their predecessors too.

Google has a lot to do with this. With the advent of effective search, people can easily find what they want to learn about or buy, all by themselves. With the advent of social software, people can find each other, all by themselves.

Web software companies rapidly improve their products in response. New companies are popping up every week as they find something that people want. Web software is characterized by quick feedback loops, community involvement, and different economic models that often means that it’s free to use. Change becomes a virtue in itself; software no longer responds to a fixed need, but to an ever-evolving one. The web space becomes a fluid mix of social and commercial networks — at an accelerating pace.

It’s worth keeping in mind that software has significant built-in social biases. Even people who build software are often unaware of this — “code is code is code” — but it’s true. And it’s a good thing. We owe a lot to the libertarian bias of the now-greying hippies who built the Internet in the first place, and the generation of entrepreneurs and coders who embody Web 2.0 are their rightful heirs.

What does this mean practically? It means, for instance, that we put the Pulse project together with two people (with the help, admittedly, of the incomparable Rachel). All the rest was software. All of it was free or nearly so. And we passed Dave Weinberger’s sniff test.

Here’s the inventory of what we used for Pulse. For me, it’s a glorious list of what makes it great to be working here, now, on the Internet. We don’t have to just play consultant and advise corporate departments what to do (so they can ignore it). We get to build it too — quickly with off-the-shelf tools. And when companies see it, then they believe it.

Publishing Platform

WordPress. Blog software, yes. But really a content management platform. Very flexible, with a huge community and plugins to meet almost every need — we used lots of them. And it’s FREE.

RSS Feeds

• Feedburner. The hardest part about RSS is figuring out how to use it. Feedburner makes it much simpler by providing an all-in one interface. With stats.
• FeedBlitz. FeedBlitz turns RSS feeds into emails. Dealing with people new to RSS? Having an email option is golden. With stats and clickthrough analysis too, and constantly improving. Phil Hollows has done a great job.
• FeedHoster. When you’re telling a story, you often need to to start from the beginning. Feedhoster lets us host a “serial” feed, so people can sign up in the middle of the project and have the same beginning-to-end experience as people who showed up on the first day. A lovely service run by Charles Coxhead in New Zealand.

WordPress plugins

These are add-ons to WordPress written by independent developers. These are what really makes WordPress rock. In alphabetical order.

• Adhesive. Lets you designate a post as “sticky”, meaning it always stays at the top. We use it for the short welcome message. By the prolific Owen Winkler at RedAlt.
• Cosmos Link By Semiologic’s Denis de Bernady. Links to blogs that link to you, via Technorati.
• del.icio.us - Bookmark this! From Arne Brachhold. Simple: lets you add a button to add a post to del.icio.us.
• Filosofo Enroll Comments. I love this plugin because I hate leaving comments, which are a form of conversation, and not knowing if anyone responded to me. Austin Matzko’s plugin lets you know, at your option.
• Google Analyticator. A real time-saver, Ronald Heft Jr.’s plugin it adds Google Analytics code into all your pages automatically. Extremely easy to use.
• Feedburner Feed Replacement. Directs all your feeds to Feedburner. Steve Smith’s plugin makes feeds much easier to manage.
• Sociable. You’d be nuts to use every option provided by Peter Harkins. Your site would look like Mardi Gras beads. It provides links on your posts for every imaginable social networking site. We use it for linking to Digg in the footer.
• Random Quotes. Nifty plugin by Dustin Barnes that lets you load up a database of quotes and display them randomly. This is shown in action on the sidebar.
• Ultimate Tag Warrior. I can’t describe it better than its author Christine Davis does: “Like [version 1], but with even greater justice. Allows tagging posts in a non-external-system dependent way; with a righteous data structure for advanced tagging-mayhem.” The plugin for tags.
• Votio. Another great plugin by Owen Winkler. Lets readers vote on posts and tallies the votes at the bottom (that’s where we put it) of each post.
• WordPress Database Backup. Yes we used it, yes we’re glad we did. By Scott Merrill.
• WP-Contact Form. Inserts a good-looking contact form into your post. Installs as a button on the “write” page of WordPress. By Ryan Duff.
• WP-Email. Lets you “send this post to a friend” by email. By GaMerZ.
• WP-Post Views. Enables Showing how many times a post has been viewed. By GaMerZ.
• WP-Tagviews. Our rock-star designer Rachel wrote this to enable showing how many times a tag has been viewed.
• Weighted Words. By Yami McMoots. Shows the frequency of words in blog posts (you can exclude any words you want) in a weighted list.

Measurement and Analysis

• Google Analytics (a.k.a. Urchin) A powerful analysis package that provides conversion tracking. For Pulse, we’re tracking subscriptions and sales of the book.
• Mint. Real-time tracking. Addictive. You can set enable an RSS feed of your referrers. This was going to be our backup to Googe Analytics, but it’s turning out to be the one we use most.
• WordTracker. Indispensable for keyword research.
• Site Content Analyzer. Very useful for analyzing your site for keyword density, importance, and relevance.

Linkology

• Rollyo. Rollyo is a surprise hit with us. It’s a “roll-your-own” search engine that searches only within the sites you specify. When we’re linking out, we want to link to sites that relevant, but which are also going to help us out. We loaded in authoritative sites for the different subject areas that Pulse covers. It’s the first place we search. (More on Linkology.)

Social Networks

• Del.icio.us. People like it, so we do too.
• Digg. People Digg it, so we do too.
• Carnivals. Carnivals are a collection of links that circulate among different bloggers within a community. For Pulse, we’re submitting what we think are the best posts to different carnivals covering the subject area of that section of the book. It’s a way to get included in the different niche-specific conversations happening in carnival circles. Also, it creates incoming links, generates relevant traffic, and gets the blog noticed by a whole group of related bloggers, not just one or two.

Publicity

• PR Web. PR Web is an online press-release service. I’m not sure that press releases have the same function they used to — getting the press to write about you — because the press has changed. But PR Web, with its online submission, makes it possible to get news that matters to you out on the web, inexpensively (there’s evena free option). Does your news matter to anyone else? One way to find out…
• RSS Submit. We’re doing a daily summary of each day’s posts and using RSS Submit to submit them to feed aggregators.

That’s our arsenal for the Pulse project.

With a couple of exceptions (database backup!), these tools either extend the power of the people using the site, or extend our power to learn what they want. That’s a good rough working definition of Web 2.0.

Tags: Pulse, pinko marketing, cluetrain, RSS, WordPress, Web 2.0

Posted by Antony in: Blogs, Media + Marketing