Archive for the 'Social Media' Category

Since the launch of this blog, a few folks have asked us what this whole social media initiative is all about. We like to point out that we’re at the forefront, in Oregon, of what people are referring to as Government 2.0 or Gov 2.0, for short. Much of the time that response begs another, equally important question: what is government 2.0 anyhow?

To gain further insight in to what Gov 2.0 is and what that means for us here at the Secretary of State’s office, let’s take a closer look at Gov 2.0; starting with a primer on the Web 2.0 ‘revolution’ and ending with a discussion on some of the ways Gov 2.0 can move government communication and accountability forward, while delivering concrete savings to Oregonians.

From Web 1.0 to Web 2.0: An internet revolution

To really understand the impact Web 2.0, we have to be perfectly clear that before its epoch, there was just ‘the web’. That is to say, Web 2.0 changed the way people communicated over the internet so drastically, the term Web 1.0 had to be used in order to describe what things were like ‘in the good ol’ days’. As the image to the left shows, Web 1.0 was essentially anchored around the web site, which organized and shared information about an online entity in a centralized, static fashion; the  equivalent of someone delivering a sermon or a speech. Organizations were connected to customers through email and telephone lines, but that was about the limit of interaction between the organization and the end-user.

Web 2.0 didn’t redesign the wheel, so much as it the re-worked the function of the wheel. It transformed the internet from a collection of websites to a platform for participation.

This transformation happened in a few waves, starting with the advent of Social media portals like Myspace followed by Facebook and LinkedIn, which allowed for previously unheard of networking online. Next, weblogs or blogs exploded onto the scene, creating a publishing platform that allowed the code illiterate to write about anything from a detailed recounting of their dinner date to substantive information and analysis on politics, news, or business; the possibilities were endless. Newly networked users quickly took advantage, becoming active contributors, content creators, and collaborators across a host of web sites and platforms.

With this boom of new content also came the need for new means of tracking and wrangling all of this information together. This was accomplished with through web syndication technology like RSS (Real Simple Syndication). Nearly every blogging platform and social networking site adopted an RSS feed. Once the RSS feed is in place, users  subscribe using news feed software like google reader and voila!, by visiting one site users could see everything going on throughout all of their favorite sites.

Web 2.0 also changed the way users discovered this information, introducing the term folksonomy to the internet vocabulary. Folksonomy refers to the system of collaboratively classifying content through the use of tags. An example of this can be seen in this search for all blog entries on the WordPress website for ‘Elections’:

Here we see the first search result and at the very bottom of that result are a number of tags, created by the author. In this example we have Lebanon, Advertisement, Campaign, etc. By clicking on any of those tag links, a user is presented all websites which share that tag. Were you on Maya Zankoul’s blog when you clicked the tag for Lebanon, you would find every entry on her blog that she tagged as Lebanon relevant.

With all of this, the transition looked like this:

Continue reading ‘What is Government 2.0 anyhow?’