The growth of social Web technologies in the mid-2000s transformed participation from something limited and infrequent to something possible anytime, for anyone, anywhere.
New online participatory tools like blogs, YouTube, and MySpace can be powerful and valuable . How did they become so successful, so popular, so quickly? It’s all about control, trust, and explorability for the user.
A few years ago, nonprofits and advocacy groups only had a handful of online tools to spread the word about themselves and their issues: if you had a website and an email list, you were pretty well covering the bases. Since the end of the dot-com boom, though, a whole new batch of applications has been simmering, and many have come to full boil in the last couple of years. From social media to blogs to viral marketing, these tools offer organizations entirely new avenues to find and interact with supporters and get their message out to the world.
The members of this recent crop of applications generally share a common characteristic: they depend on the active participation of many different people for their success. Loosely gathered together as “Web 2.0″ technologies (a phrase that has almost as many definitions as it has definers), these “social” or “participatory” applications become more powerful as more people contribute.
Youtube as an Example
What is it? Well, Youtube is by far the most popular free video sharing website…out of the hundreds that already exist. While a site with one person’s video clips can be interesting, it’s not likely to be revolutionary in the same way as a site that holds millions of people’s clips and lets others to display them on their own sites.
Blogs follow a similar logic, since bloggers are constantly referring to each other in an ongoing conversation as well as building content from readers’ comments and contributions. Social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook? The same idea — as more people participate, the value of the whole system tends to increase.
Collaborative Consumption
Here’s the video we watched in class together.
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Read more about participatory nature and the idea of Museum 2.0.
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