A few months ago, I answered a question posed, i think, on one of the LinkedIn discussion groups (as MrPaladin) where someone wanted to know about Web2.0. My answer was roundly accepted as authoritative and descriptive. But in retrospect, it was probably provincial and pedantic. The answer I gave described the feature of Web2.0 applications that allows interaction with the user without reloading the page. I used as examples perhaps web pages with stock tickers, or news tickers which constantly update their content, or folks who put their latest tweets from Twitter on their web page to be updated the minute each gem of wisdom gets published.

That answer was correct, but one dimensional, because it focused only on the appearances and apparent technology. In a practical sense, Web2.0 is a much larger concept.

At Paladin Consultants, LLC we do web sites, and web services. Many of the technologies we use come from more sophisticated and mission critical applications. Over the past decade, developments in computer languages, processing speed, band width and transmission speed has grown, with an associated increment in demand and expectations for more sophisticated content, marketing, interaction, and entertainment in web sites. This article is an exposition of some of those methods and techniques.

Another article, which discusses the technology of XML (eXtentible Markup Language) was published a few weeks ago in our blog.    XML is another indispensable tool for creating and maintaining content in web2.0 pages.

The early web sites were billboards. They advertised their clients’ product for all who passed by. This progressed rapidly to shopping carts, so that the passers by could order and pay for products. But there were obvious limitations. In the first place, folks don’t like to read long web pages. So the amount of information offered on a page needed to be limited, or, even better, refined so that the user got served only what he was interested in.

Second, marketing grew more sophisticated. Instead of just offering products to a mass market, web sites not are able to establish a kind of a dialog, or relationship with the customer. This is accomplished through interaction over the web. You don’t want to force the customer to reload pages with every choice, so new technology now allows the user’s machine to go and request new data, choices, colors, or what have you while the customer is browsing elsewhere on the page. That new information is requested, received, and formatted behind the scenes, and inserted into the appropriate place while the customer reads on without interruption.

This Twitter widget is something I have resisted putting on our blog and web site. Not all the things I mention on Twitter are, strictly speaking, technology and business related. But in the overall context of things, perhaps that’s not all bad. People sometimes value that the folks they are dealing with are real people and have personalities just like them. And this Twitter widget is a good example of how you can be more in touch and interact with your customer. It puts a ‘human face’ on your company brand.

Web2.0 is said to be the embodiment of more exciting, interesting and topical content into today’s web by using new technology such as javascript, video, sound, and content from other sites. Interaction and content from Flickr, Twitter, Google, YouTube. The ability to embed this new technology into web sites and deliver them to users through their browser brings a welcome new dimension to web communication with the customer.

Story of my life from Paladin Consultants LLC on Vimeo.

Here’s a very short video a friend recently sent me. It suits me to a tee philosophically, and it is illustrative of the purpose and intent of this article in a very real way. See if you don’t agree that content of this sort will make a user more receptive. See if you don’t agree that it can go a long towards establishing a connection between the site’s owner and the prospective client/customer/user.

Here’s a demonstration of a web2.0 technique that combines the solution of economy of screen real estate with a clever way of ascertaining and then delivering content tailored to a user’s preferences.  Click on one of the dark subject words below.

Web2.0 is a great technology because it delivers on target to so many points:

Interest
By your choice of ‘Interest’ you have shown that this subject is a key hot button for you. You don’t need to be bothered by the other items, and clicking on the key word can be both recorded and rewarded. At the same time, screen real estate is conserved. Sometimes when a user is confronted with a huge page of text with no ‘candy’ he will move on before you get your point across.

Content
You are able to add interesting and rich content to your articles or pages in a way that didn’t exist until very recently. Sometimes you might want to add a video extolling the virtues and benefits of your products, or convey an idea in an entertaining way.

Marketing & SalesHere, as I suggested above, you are able to ferret out the user’s preferences, and deliver a targeted response. You are fmeeting his/her needs in a way that was impossible before. You are able to establish esily a relationship with the user which is non-threatening and helpful. And this technology will help you distinguish yourself from your competitors.

ROITechnology, properly implemented, is an effective and cost saving technique. You are able to use a veritable smorgasbord of other sites’ technology (such as in my Twitter example) including Google, Flickr, Yahoo, and many many others. Many sites encourage use of their content, and even provide maps, or hooks into them because they want to cooperate and establish a standard. This is good because you can use this free content to offer information and service to your clients. A prominent example of this is Google Maps, which are appearing on many retail sites today. And, although the technology is not ‘so simple a caveman can do it’, it is well proven, reliable, and effective.

The purpose of this article is to suggest various ways that one can improve his content and delivery to targeted and happy potential customers. The fast moving technologies embedded in web2.0 web pages is growing more powerful and pervasive every day. If I were to talk about all of the technology, the article would too long and uninteresting. So I have confined my remarks to suggesting business uses of this technology. If you would like to see more examples shown in a non-technical and non-threatening environment, the folks at the Academy of the Sacred Heart in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan have put together an excellent primer on the subject. Another, more technical source is the W3Schools Online Web Tutorials.

Please feel free to comment on this article below.

Shortly after my article was published, I got a tweet, from Eugene Mandel, who invited me to discuss the whole concept of data mining on Twitter.  That tweet led to a very collegial telephone conversation between us, in which we exchanged ideas which will provide the basis for this article.

Eugene is a very engaging young entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, who has been involved with a number of startups.  His current plans integrate very nicely with my concept of Twitter data mining.  My prediction is that his newest venture, mustexist.com, is destined to become an important tool for Twitter users.  He recently started the company with his pal and co-founder, Alex Sherstinsky, a Ph.D. from MIT.  These guys are very serious players.

Mustexist’s current product is called list tags. It allows one to take a twitter name, and creates a ‘cloud’ of lists in which that Twitter name appears, roughly signifying the importance of keywords in that person’s list audience by the size of the type in the cloud.

Here’s a copy of Glenn Beck’s tag cloud.  I shrunk it down to accommodate the page size, and its contextual importance in this article.  Beck is on some 3800 lists.  Politics, News, and political head the parade, but further down the list are lists named things like ‘nutcase’, and other less desirable things to be associated with.  Mandel goes through the Twitter API, and finds all the lists on which Glenn Beck is mentioned.  Then, he queries those lists and finds the most popular keywords in their title.  Then he ranks those keywords by their frequency of appearance in Beck’s universe of lists, and performs a simple statistical conversion to interpolate the list keyword frequency to the type size in the cloud.

Pretty neat trick, eh?

But there’s more: list_tags enumerates some of the lists on which the Twitter member appears.  Here’s a picture of the TopLists for “Politics” in which Glenn Beck appears.  Now think, for a moment how valuable this information can be.  Many of these “top” lists contain 400–500 members.  These are lists for the top topic which have the largest number of members – regardless of whether or not the subject appears on those lists.  That’s valuable information for marketers, or for researchers and even job seekers.  But more than that– everyone who is maintaining such a list is someone who has enough interest in your subject to go to the trouble of maintaining a list of people who he/she considers are the leaders in the field.  And if that’s not enough, the lists editors is another valuable source of fertile relationships to cultivate.

The second. longer list is a list of which Glenn is a member.  So, in the case of a celebrity, it will not be unlikely that the same names will be on both lists.  I’ll not reproduce the Lists for ‘politics’ because it is too long – and because in appearance it strongly resembles in format the ‘Top List’.

So the stage is set now with a resource now to empower Twitter users with access to many lists.  A little resourcefulness will enable you to harvest those lists, and, by extension, to knowledge of all of their membership.  This will give you first hand access to communicating with the most well-regarded people in any given field!  And with the LIstimonkey resource, you can monitor the conversations of those experts for keywords.  With a little software jiggering and less than an hour’s effort, using our Glenn Beck example, we could identify, harvest and communicate with thousands of political junkies.

Mandel, however, is talking about taking Mustexist to a whole other level.  Using the database he has assembled for the list-tag project, he is planning to offer in the near future an interactive, iterative way of ‘surfing’ the tweetstream of these lists, in much the same was that Google lets you surf for articles.  He made the analogy of a newspaper in our conversation.  Each newspaper has several sections: sport, business, local, etc.  If you accept the proposition that a list’s tweetstream is like a newspaper, then it would be very productive to skim through the newspaper, looking only for articles that interested you.  You could skip the car ads, and dating club ads, and focus on baseball, or international news.

Similarly, over a period of time, a list’s tweetstream will have a lot of chaff: someone’s opinion of last night’s American Idol, inclement weather, mother-in-law coming for a visit…  But what if you could adopt a list, or amalgam of similar interest lists?  What if you could in real time and on an ad hoc basis query the stream for stuff like: climategate?  cap and trade?  world health organization?  BTU content of coal?  And how powerful would it be if you could pursue your line of inquiry immediately, based on feedback you got from the previous question?

I think that MustExist is on the verge of somthing quite important that will add a new dimension of empowerment to the serious Twitter user.  There are currently some 23 million Twitter users, 75% of which are either classified as ‘addicts’ or ‘regulars’.  That’s a reliable 18 million pairs of eyeballs scanning and interacting with Twitter several times a week – sometimes several times a day.  Any tool that can reliably and easily segment relevant portions of that population and then address them is bound to be very successful.

Please add your comments.  It is helpful to hear the opinions of our readers!

Facebook and Twitter were innovative at the time, and helped businesses form a relationship with clients with a more personal approach, allowing a subtle transition from a purely passive approach to their prospective clients to a more pro-active and personal one.  A lot of folks missed the point of Twitter and Twitter and came late to the party.  The same can be said for the late adopters of Facebook, who didn’t understand their kids’ fascination with the social aspects of Facebook.  College kids live on facebook.  Andif you had any doubt about the centrality of Facebook to the zeitgheist of our society, one need look no further than Michaele and Tarek Salahi’s crashing the Whitehouse state dinner late last month.  Pictures of them and Obama and them and Biden were on their Facebook page before dawn.

I wish I had a nickle for everyone who commented on my embracing the Twitter idiom with a snide comment like, ‘What do I care what people had for breakfast.’  A lot of folks are missing the point of both of these social sites:  they provide a way to form quasi social relationships, and so called weak friendships.  Their point is that people are more apt to do business with people with whom they have some sort of connection.  If you’re looking for someone to re-do your kitchen, you’re much more likely to choose someone from your church, or even someone who is friendly with the butcher whom you lilke.  I am not a big Facebook user because it is too time intensive, but I have met quite a few friends, professional colleagues, and business partners on Twitter.

But Twitter is still a quasi passive platform, though the lines are blurry.  I do know that the easiest way to turn someone off on Twitter is to come onto him with a hard sell:  ‘I’ve made $15,000 this month on Twitter, and I can show you how to do it, too!!!!!’

But thee are now on the horizon two very important developments which promise to significantly enhance the power of using Twitter.

But first a small diversion.  Earlier this year, an enterprising your Australian named Chris Duell developed a site called Twitterhawk.  Now the idea of Twitterhawk is that the site sifts through the Twitterstream looking for key words that you set that occur near a geographic location that you specify.  So if you were a carpenter in Peoria, you might set up a search that looks for kitchen remodeling in Peoria.  Twitterhawk would return to you a list of those tweets,  And, for a few cents a tweet, Twitterhawk would send a series of rotating tweets to those whose tweets you designated as appropriate targets.

Back to those new Twitter innovations.  The first was the implemenjtation of lists on Twitter.  Now you can create lists of folks on Twitter that you follow.  And you can categorize them with common traits, for example software architects (like Paladin Consultants, LLC ), or economists, or photographers.  It helps you keep track of people, especially when you have lots of followers.  You can see the Twitterstreams of these lists, and even get an RSS feed of them.  Better still, in most cases everyone has access to virtually all of everybody else’s lists!

And where can you find and mine these lists?  Listorius is one of the first resources dedicated to managing the new feature.  Mashable also has a growing arsenal of Twitter Lists.  Unless I miss my guess, new sites dedicated to this new tool will be popping up like mushrooms after a spring rain!

The second innovation comes from a site called Listimonkey, a site designed by a very clever young Belgian expatriate named Xavier Damman, now living in the Bay Area.  He has also managed to secure a domain name in his own name!  Anyway, his wrinkle on Twitter is that if you send Listimonkey the name of a twitter list, a key word or phrase, and your email, Listimonkey will email you with a set periodicity the tweets from members of that list contain your key word or phrase!  Now, although there is some SEO juice and pride in having a large list, this is not necessary to work with Listimonkey.  In fact, you can use anybody’s public list!  (Most lists are public.)

Now think about that.  If you are a real estate agent in Chicago, you might watch somebody’s Chicago list for the key word ‘moving’.  If you were a photographer in Atlanta, you’d watch somebody’s Atlanta list for the keyword ‘wedding’ or ‘getting married’.  And, Listimonkey allows you to create as many of these list/keyword combinations as you like!  Very powerful, and a dimensional abstract improvment on Twitterhawk’s idea!

But Listimonkey is good not only for finding new customers and clients.  It’s great for finding out about new products, techniques, people, trends- wealth of information from one site that harnesses the communal information it mines from the Twitterstream!

I’m afraid Xavier’s innovation will spell bad news for Chris Duell and Twitterhawk.  It’s a shame, but the market marches on.  One can only wish Chris Duell luck, and hope that he has another great idea.  But with talent like he’s shown, I am sure that his next idea is right around the corner.

But getting back to Listimonkey, as those emails come rolling in from Listimonkey, it would be pretty easy for a good software developer to come up with a program which would parse those emails as they came in, and then tweet appropriate messages to the originators of those tweets mentioning the keyword(s).  Xavier has such a good idea, that I predict will soon overrun his mailserver.  But that will be an happy problem for him to solve!

Please leave a comment, so we know whether or not we are on target!  It helps us find out what our readers think.

These advances in technology bring benefits and challenges for small businesses like ours.  First, we much do the work for our clients for which they have hired us.  That’s how we get paid and earn our living.  Second, we must find new work, because when current projects are finished, we will need new ones to take their place.  Third, we must continue to learn so that we do not become obsolete and unable to compete.  Unfortunately, only one of these items is directly revenue producing.

Way back before the turn of the century, I remember reading that the amount of knowledge in the world was doubling every five years.  On a visit to my Uncle Joe, who was a senior chemist at duPont at the time, I asked him if he thought this was a true statement, how one could possible know this, if it referred to unique knowledge or many folks knowing the same thing, and all the things a curious kid might ask.  He allowed that he wouldn’t be surprised if it were true, and mused that perhaps it could be measured by the amount of ’stuff’ written in scientific journals, etc.  The DNA molecule had been modelled, we had put a man on the moon, developed nuclear weapons, and so on.

If it were a true fact them, it is certainly doubling much faster now.  We have the Internet, digitized books and other media, catalogs – all manner of convenient and expanding knowledge and technology.  And there is every indication that these trends will continue- perhaps at an even faster rate.

Animal behaviorists have long been aware of the ‘Honey Dance‘ that bees to to alert other bees to the location of nectar.  A bee will find a source of nectar, then go back to the hive and do a dance that shows the other bees the distance and direction of his (there’s only ONE queen, and SHE doesn’t look for honey!) find.  The bees have developed a way to share information, and use communal intelligence and collective effort to maximize their efficiency in gathering food for the hive.

This brings us to the human honey dance!  Todays writings in blogs and websites in continuing to explode over the internet.  Now I am sure that there are many folks writing things out there that may be of great value to me and my company.  But I have no idea who or where.  That’s where the social networking sites come in.  The early entry was Facebook.  My daughter has a Facebook account since high school, and has about 1000 ‘friends’.  They’re not real friends, of course, but the culture of their tribe mandated that ones population of Facebook ‘friends’ was an indicator of popularity, and therefore success.  But they are almost 1000 people that she can correspond with, ask advice from, and, perhaps have commerce with.  And maybe that’s not so bad a thing!

Facebook was followed in the business worls by LinkedIn.  Now LinkedIn, though limited to 3000 invites per person, can theoretically give you access to 27 billion connections (not counting the folks whi invite you)!  Twitter is another source of these ‘loose connections’.  I’ve seen some folks on twitter with 50,000 plus followers.  The statistics are unclear about how all these connections translate into actual business.  And I do not see managing connections in numbers anywhere near these.  But maybe it’s not about managing connections.  I’ve met some very interesting and smart folks through LinkedIn and Twitter, and have given and gotten a fair number of ideas.  I suspect that in the longer run, within your network of followers, the folks who are able to share new ideas through their reliable ‘Honey Dance’ will eventually earn the respect of the other players in their network, whatever it’s size.