The Globe and Mail and Me on Web2.0 | May 23rd, 2006
Last month, I spoke with Dan Maclean of the Globe and Mail and ITWorldCanada.com on Web 2.0 and how it can help businesses in a marketing sence. Here’s a a little snipit.
Since then, Web 2.0 applications have been stirring the imagination of regular folk and businesses alike, with a much richer and more interactive on-line experience. Andre Charland, president of eBusiness Applications Ltd., an application development company in Vancouver, points out that companies such as Nike Inc. and Ford Motor Co. are already using Web 2.0 applications such as blogs for marketing and internal communications. Meanwhile, the dashboard concept is being turned into an effective corporate tool for managing business data and information to support applications such as on-line customer orders and sales notifications.
Business successes have emerged. In the space of collaborative publishing and information sharing, blogs and wikis have spawned companies such as Wikipedia, dig, Flickr and del.icio.us. Then there are companies like Amazon.com and Google that have parlayed popularity and profit from the Web 2.0-based search and information tools.
“It’s all about sharing data so that people can do what they want with it,” Mr. Charland says.
“I think there’s still the ‘what’s the business model?’ discussion going on,” he admits. But he adds: “All businesses should be taking a look at how blogging can impact their marketing and internal communications . . . or how to use wikis to improve their collaborations.”
What’s interesting is that I first started blogging about skiing 3 years ago and didn’t immediately realize the value to businesses. I just wanted to share some stories with friends and the rest of the community about one my passions, skiing deep powder all over the world!! Since that time our busines has embraced blogging we have over 5 bloggers and an AJAX Community Blog (AjaxInfo.com). It has to lead to a book project, Enterprise AJAX, with Prentice Hall and solid business relationships with company’s such as Adobe Systems and Sun Microsystems. It has definitely helped us position ourselves as experts in AJAX and UI design, which in turn has lead to many great speaking opportunities. Not to mention it’s our 4th top source of internet traffic to our company home page and our combined blogs receive over 1000 unique visits per day. We also use Wikis (Trac) to manage our internal development projects and team. We also use a wiki to promote new and beta products at http://labs.ebusiness-apps.com.
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