Jeff Bell Blog

In my opinion, blogging is the first and one of the earliest forms of social media. Blogging is the first phase of “the wisdom of the crowd.” As I have written before, the first websites were brochure-ware, controlled by Webmasters. After the “Dot Com” bubble burst, the web came back much improved. Some people call it Web 2.0, and some dispute whether it improved that much, but it certainly enabled anyone to participate, and to publish. Participation came with bulletin boards and forums, and participation came with blogs. Blogs let anyone sign up and start publishing. Of course for most blogs, no one knew they existed and did not read them (like mine). But even at their best, blogs are a form of “one to many” publication. Some blogs have "comments" but they are hard to use, hard to follow. They read like the dead sea scrolls...literally. With Facebook or MySpace, you see the next evolution. Anyone can publish themselves, and others can comment or post or share photo...

As we know, the Internet has evolved from a crude communication tool to its current role as the backbone for global information publishing and acquisition, communication and commercial transactions. When we quickly review the changing World Wide Web, we see that we started with static web pages. They were basically brochures online. We have see from there several interesting developments in communication on the web, moving well beyond emails and instant messaging. These all fall into the category of publishing, and represent the democratization of information, and the formation of community. The first trend in publishing to consider is “Micro-blogging” (the most famous of which is Twitter). This content is highly perishable, and only relevant in fleeting moments in time. People literally share their moment by moment experiences; their reactions to events and the actions of others. It is social small talk with a wide range of subjects. This type of information and its frequent updates i...