Web evolution

Check out my latest post over at the Hanson Dodge blog titled "Semantic Web – what is it, and how did we get here?". I give a brief history of web evolution from 1.0 to 2.0 and delve into the next evolution into the semantic web. A term being used to describe the next generation of the web as it becomes smarter. Enjoy!

Walmart down for "maintenance"?

Wow this is the second time in just over a week I’ve stumbled across a big name dot com that is down for "maintenance". Having worked in this field for a while I’ve used “maintenance” pages like this on sites big and small as a more graceful application error page or during an upgrade or deployment.

I’ve always thought that when you’re a multibillion dollar retailer like Wallmart or a big name social networking site like LinkedIn it puts you in a different league where you have uber redundancy and 99.9% uptime. Seeing unexpected maintenance pages like this especially on Wallmart (a site that generates a lot of revenue from ecommerce) validates that my above mentioned approach is still used for websites of all shapes and sizes!

Great new book on social media for corporations

Last week I attended a webinar title "Join the Groundswell in Enterprise Social Software" hosted by Lithium and authors of a new Forrester book titled "Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies ".

It focused on successful examples of using social media to enhance a company’s dialog with its customers online. The reoccurring theme was that people are already talking about your brand online whether it is on blogs, discussion boards or portals. And the recommendation was to embrace this medium and participate in the discussion versus becoming a spectator. Ultimately doing this will give you a deeper understand of your customers and help to retain and recruit new brand advocates.

There was some great advice for things to consider before adding a community and social networking feature to your site. If you’re currently wrangling with community and social media ideas and want somewhere to start I would suggest doing what I did and ordering the book.

LinkedIn down... even the pros have problems

I went to log in to LinkedIn today on my lunch break today and I was confronted with an error message "LinkedIn Will Be Back Soon". Its reminder that even the pro's with lots of money and uber server architecture experience occassional technical issues with their web applications too!