Why Google Reader Might be the Missing Link in Your Social Media Workflow « P Morgan Brown. I wrote in length about identifying and implementing a social media workflow as a way to make social media work for you and your organization while not becoming overwhelming or too much of a time suck. Today I want to look at a particularly powerful tool that is often under-utilized in social media workflows. Google Reader not only makes reading and sharing news easy; but it is also an important tool in building your following and reputation as a thought-leader online. In this post I’ll show you how I use Google Reader to engage followers, build credibility and thought leadership, stregthen relationships and improve visibility across the social Web and Twitter in particular. The premise is simple – share links to articles, blog posts, podcasts and videos relevant to your area of interest as a way to provide value to the people that follow you (and hopefully their followers as well via retweets) by being a filter that identifies high-quality content in the river of noise that is the Web.
Toward Semantic Virtual Worlds - A Thinkpiece - Converjed. One of the things that has struck me over the last few weeks in discussions about where virtual worlds are going is that we are in danger of making the same mistake made by application development and the web, by concentrating on the wrong thing. With virtual worlds, and the moves towards interoperability and standards, there is a real opportunity to get things right first time. The "mistake" is that we tend to concentrate on the visual. It's only natural, it's probably our most powerful sense and the one that most of us would least wish be without - and hardly a surprising one for virtual worlds! Since the first computer read-out and green-screen VDU we have developed computer applications and their user interface as a single entity. The development of the mash-up culture has pushed this even further.
The "solution" of course is the Semantic Web - championed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. So what's all this got to do with virtual worlds? But to me all this is missing the point. Some examples. Ten major web trends. We're well into the current era of the Web, commonly referred to as Web 2.0. Features of this phase of the Web include search, social networks, online media (music, video, etc), content aggregation and syndication (RSS), mashups (APIs), and much more. Currently the Web is still mostly accessed via a PC, but we're starting to see more Web excitement from mobile devices (e.g. iPhone) and television sets (e.g. XBox Live 360). What then can we expect from the next 10 or so years on the Web? Bearing all that in mind, here are 10 Web trends to look out for over the next 10 years... 1.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee's vision for a Semantic Web has been The Next Big Thing for a long time now. As Alex Iskold wrote in The Road to the Semantic Web, the core idea of the Semantic Web is to create the meta data describing data, which will enable computers to process the meaning of things. So when will the Semantic Web arrive? Semantic Web pic by dullhunk 2. Nevertheless, AI has a lot of promise on the Web. 3. 4. Reuters wants world being tagged. As Richard MacManus recently predicted, in 2008 we'll witness the rise of semantic web services. From the native support for Microformats in Firefox 3, to the New York Times' utilization of rich headers metadata, to this week's release of the Social Graph API by Google, semantics are starting to slip onto the web.
The impact is being felt because large companies are really starting to focus on structured information. In the same vein, last week Reuters - an international business and financial news giant - launched an API called Open Calais. The API does a semantic markup on unstructured HTML documents - recognizing people, places, companies, and events. This technology is the next generation of the Clear Forest offering, which Reuters acquired last year. We have profiled Clear Forest on ReadWriteWeb and in this post we will look at what Reuters opened up and why. Open Calais API Basics The idea behind Calais is simple - identify interesting bits into metadata in documents. Conclusion.