Web 2.0 Convergence

Here's some very exciting news about innovative ways to find out what Americans are concerned about.

With war, recession and elections on their minds, Americans may feel they need access to news information now more than ever.

The James L. Knight Foundation selected three cities in America to hold public forums to address these issues and get a snapshot of how people in certain areas of the country gather news.

 Missoula, MT made the final cut, as did Philadelphia, PA and Mountain View, CA., home of Google.

The University of Montana's School of Journalism and Dean Peggy Kuhr are hosting the Missoula forum.

Kuhr said the evolution of news technology through the Internet is parallel to the continued revenue crisis in the news industry.

Because more newspapers are accessible online for free, subscriptions nationwide have plummeted and newsroom staffs are getting laid off to make ends meet, she said, "There's a real strain on the traditional media to try and maintain their news share."

In addition to several panel discussions featuring prominent figures from around Montana, the commission depends on input from the public.

Comments from all guests will be kept on a record for the commission to consider. "We don't just want talking heads," Kuhr said, " the opinion of younger Montanans is especially crucial."

The university will compile results from the community involvement program and then will release a list of recommendations for changes in public policy, if needed, regarding news media access and coverage and how to use the new media to be more effective in communications.

The commission will release its findings in the spring of 2009.

Now here is an institution committed to determining whether or not young people feel the issues they care about are being covered in mainstream media. I am anxious to see what the results are.


Photo of Missoula, MT by Jason Lengstorf. Creative Commons License Attribution 2.0 Generic

What do the United Arab Emirates, FriendFeed and EveryZing have in common? All three are current examples of the explosion of new media technology and applications that we need to be aware of.

Here is an interesting breakthrough in the use of new media applications.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE), Dubai Naturalization and Residency Department (DNRD) has launched new mobile M-Visa facilities to offer its customers instant notifications via email and text messages upon issuance of their entry visa permits. This service is available at www.ednrd.ae.

When a visa is issued, customers will be notified through an email and SMS message. The email includes an original visa document (PDF format) bearing DNRD logo and the signature of the Director. The PDF will be secure to avoid any tampering with the details of the visitor.

The SMS notification encloses the same bar code printed on the original visa document in a 2D format, as well as key indicators about the visitor and the designated sponsor. The SMS can be sent to any destination around the world and the UAE-based sponsor will also receive the same notifications.

Upon arrival at to any of UAE entry points, the bar code scanner set up at the DNRD check points will read the details of the entry permit directly off the mobile devices of the visitors to make their entry into the country easy and quick. This innovative service starting January 2009 at Dubai entry points.

On a different point, EveryZing, a media indexing company, is launching its own media player that will let people search for spoken words within videos. The player's secret power is that it also indexes YouTube videos, giving a publisher who embeds YouTube content more functionality than YouTube itself provides.

The new video player, called MetaPlayer, uses technology the company already has in the market in its ezSearch and ezSEO products.

MetaPlayer is provided to its customers alongside other back-end tools. On sites that support it people will be able to type in a query in the video player and see where on that video (and other videos on the site), the term entered comes up; they can then jump to that spot.

A new kid on the block is to be found at www.newmediabytes.com FriendFeed is a social aggregator that consolidates the updates from social media and social networking websites such as blog entries, social book-marking websites, and micro-blogging updates. Users can then use this consolidated stream of information to create customized feeds to share with friends.

FriendFeed recently released the Real-Time Updates feature that allows you to watch live updating aggregation streams on the site. You can also take these streams and embed then on your own blog if you like.

This feature opens the door to many possibilities for live streaming conversations about a particular topic, among a specific group of people and around certain events.

FriendFeed provides the facility to track these activities (such as posting on blogs, Twitter and Flickr across a broad range of different social networks. FriendFeed is based in Mountain View, California.

Photo by Christian Horcel. Creative Commons License Attribution 2.0 Generic

The three recent Saturday Night Live (SNL) send-up parodies of Vice-Presidential nominee Sarah Palin by Tina Fey demonstrate a significant Web turning point.

The audiences watching the show as it was broadcast were significant. However, those viewing on-line or through digital video recorders were twice as large according to numbers released by Integrated Media Measurement Inc (IMMI).

According to IMMI, this is one of the first times "delayed viewing numbers topped the original viewing audience" by such a wide margin.

SNL skits are also enjoying strong ratings on NBC's www.hulu.com site.

These so-called secondary audiences are important for mainstream media as a source of new revenue.

SNL is aware that many of its prime target audiences are not sitting at home watching the tube. On Saturday night they are hitting the night spots at theatres, clubs and bars. So these short SNL skits make for great viewing the next day for web savvy younger audiences.

Saturday Night Live has plans in the works to launch a dedicated Website with short skits to create a revenue source for the parent network through the sale of advertisements, subscriptions or paid downloads.

Another example of the web unleashed is the emergence of specialized professional websites such as www.law.com where viewers can find a wide range of blogs on topics such as law, lobbying, politics, crime, courts, business and culture in the nation's capital and beyond.

Similar specialized sites exist for every profession from health to finance to emergency planning.

With the tough economic times we are now facing, smart organizations need to recognize this potential revenue stream so they can unleash the power of the Web to their advantage.

And for governments, this is just one more indicator that Web 2.0 is changing how segments of the population access information.


Photo: Thomas Roache - Creative Commons License Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic

In case you didn't notice it as a news item on the Digital Communities site, here's an announcement of a new resource for local governments exploring Web 2.0 technologies....

Many new web developments, now collectively referred to under the umbrella of Web 2.0, are receiving increased scrutiny in the government sector. Basic questions arise. Is Web 2.0 simply another hype storm created by technocrats and marketers in an attempt to generate new demand for products?  Or do these technologies offer a real answer to some of the traditional shortcomings of citizen government interaction?

A new white paper from the Digital Communities' CIO Task Force explores these and other questions as part of coming to terms with what these CIOs are now calling Government 2.0 - the efforts undertaken by communities, states and the federal government to implement the new tools and technologies that extend the utility of the Internet.

"Government 2.0: Building Communities with Web 2.0 and Social Networking is the first in a series of Digital Communities white papers that will be produced by our task forces,"  explained Todd Sander, deputy director of the Center for Digital Government and director of the Digital Communities program. "It provides a candid look into the thinking of CIO Task Force members as they struggle to balance the opportunity for broader community engagement with issues of security, infrastructure capacity and public perception."

Among those jurisdictions that have chosen to explore the possibilities, the consensus seems to be that Web 2.0 can help government enhance its existing relationship with citizens by creating new avenues of interaction. But based on research conducted by the Center for Digital Government, it is clear that for every community that has decided to explore the possibilities another has decided not to; at least not right now.

According to Sander, the reasons for this are varied. "Some cite excessive demand on limited infrastructure and bandwidth, others security concerns, and many the difficulty overcoming the perception that such sites demonstrate no recognizable or defensible legitimate business use and provide little more than the opportunity for public employees to waste time at work," he said.

Yet a number of jurisdictions who are exploring some of the potential of Web 2.0 technologies are gaining positive insights, some of which are detailed in the white paper.

Moreover, the vision of government is starting to shift. As the white paper notes, "Perhaps the greatest potential for Web 2.0 technology in local government is its ability to, as Washington, D.C., CIO Vivek Kundra said, 're-establish the public square' and create and connect communities of interest."

That notion alone makes this an intriguing white paper, well worth a read.

A full copy of the white paper can be downloaded free from the Digital Communities Resource Center.

The current election for Prime Minster in Canada serves up an excellent example of how using the new media can backfire if you don't think things through.

It is important to note that Canada has five political parties in the run for office. Four are national parties and one is Quebec-based. This makes the dynamics of politics more interesting than in many places where voters are limited to a choice of Party A or Party B!

With approximately 17 million Canadians having Facebook pages it seemed like a good idea to make use of the power of social networking to connect with the under-25 crowd.

This is the first time in Canadian election history that every party leader has a Facebook page. They use their page to post policy announcements, pictures of their families, their favourite movies and other personal information, all aimed at making them more appealing to young voters.

However, there are new rules for the new media.

Before the advent of Facebook, political parties carefully controlled the content and style of their ads, how they were placed in radio, TV and print lineups. They would conduct media monitoring and analysis to see how successful they were at achieving their political objectives.

This is not what happens with Facebook pages.

Citizens are posting unflattering comments on the leaders' sites and some are using Facebook to turn things around - to use Facebook to organize against the parties and their leaders.

For example, when the one party's leader opposed the addition of another leader in a nationally televised debate, he was slammed by people who said they had been his supporters, but could no longer support him or his party because of his "narrow-minded opposition."

Facebook pages give voters that instant opportunity to express their opposition and to open up discussion.

On Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Facebook page, one user managed to put a "Redneck" label on his photo. Not what you want to see on your page!

Another Facebook group has been formed calling themselves "Anti-Harper Vote Swapping Canada." They have set up a system to help users strategically prevent wins by Harper's Conservative party. It works by connecting users whose preferred candidate has little chance of winning with other members willing to vote for the party that has the best chance at stopping the local Conservative candidate.

Will, this work? It's hard to say, however,  predictions are that no one party will be able to break through with a clear majority, so these swing seats could be very critical.

Note to politicians: when you decide to use the new media you better be ready for creative counter-uses by the new media-savvy crowd.


Photo by Jacob Bøtter. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic

This is a great example of why organizations, in this case the largest university in British Columbia, Canada, need to be ready to use the new media to get their messages out quickly and effectively when things go wrong.

On Wednesday, January 30th, 2008, the University of British Columbia (UBC) Biological Sciences building was locked down by the on campus police, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) for "no apparent reason."

Reports indicated that the RCMP did not disclose a reason for the lock down other than because they had received a threat:

"Information is being withheld to protect the public," said RCMP Cst. Annie Linteau. She said releasing details about the threat - which was not a bomb threat "could jeopardize the investigation."

While the university had recently acquire a text messaging system, they decided not to use it because it had not been tested and only 40% of the student population had enrolled in the program.

Hello ... if you could reach 40% of your student body, wouldn't you see this as the ideal way to test your system in a real world situation.? Not UBC.

Officials in charge decided it was better to send university staff, in their little Gucchi shoes and tweeds, trip-trapping down the hallways, knocking on doors, advising students to not leave their classes until they were given a code word.

No use was made of public address systems, no use of SMS text messaging, no use of electronic message boards, just profs walking down the hallways.

Remember what happened in other recent serious university incidents? The perpetrators shot everyone they saw in the hallways!

It is a mistake to hold information back - I recommend that organizations tell people what is happening. And they need to do it quickly and effectively.

The next day, announcer Belle Puri from Canada's national radio network, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), "On the Coast" interviewed me to get my reaction to what had happened.

I explained that the stakeholders (students) were communicating effectively amongst one another and with family via mobile phone and the Internet. However, the voices of authority remained silent.

I emphasized that it is important for crisis communicators to explain what is happening and why people should listen to you. In other words, provide a method to your madness.

In the UBC case, there was no apparent reason given to students to stay in place.

Moreover, people need reassurance that everything is going to be okay; otherwise, lack of knowledge breeds rumour, fear, and panic. In crisis situations, stakeholders need to be informed as to what is going on--and fast.

A few days later, Wednesday, February 6th, the UBC Biological Sciences building was closed again, with classes canceled for the day. The Vancouver Sun reported that the police were unsure as to the nature of the threat(s).

Again, RCMP Cst. Linteau would not say how the second threat was received, but said it was "unspecified" in nature, meaning they would not name a time, location or method of doing harm. The RCMP simply stated that the threat had been which had made against UBC last Wednesday -- focusing on the bio-sciences building -- would be carried out today.

Once again the university did not use it's "test" text messaging system to communicate with their students.

From my observation of local and national media and from my perspective, the RCMP's communication style has become an issue.

Also, the credibility of the university was at risk because of "paralysis of analysis."

When things go wrong, organizations get one chance to get out first with their messages.

In the age of the Media 2.0, organizations need to use the new media quickly and effectively or they will be left at the starting blocks. Everyone else will be getting their messages out and you will be left out of the mix.

Photo on UBC Bioscience building by 604 Plonker. Creative Common License Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic

For some time now I have held a belief that the new media, as demonstrated by the World Wide Web is a continuously morphing conversation that has more in common with ancient oral traditions of storytelling than it does with books and journals.

Rather than being permanent and immutable, the web allows people to pick their way through information, change it, respond to it and create communications with each other. Wikipedia is a perfect example of this shifting intercourse.

A recent study done by John Foley of the University of Missouri supports my theses as well.

Foley says the new media follows the same traditions that used to happen around the campfire and at the local tavern, where stories, news and songs were shared, never the same way twice. "The stories could bend and morph and adapt depending on who was there and what the mood of the audience was, " he says, "And people weren't just the receivers of information, it was participatory, they were co-creators."

Sound familiar?

The old media, particularly newspapers are limited by their greatest strength: permanence.

From the storyteller's perspective, when stories are written down, they die. The book must be a monologue that must be absorbed sequentially, word after word, sentence after sentence. Put that way it sounds like a ploddingly dull way to get information. No wonder the under-25 generation is not interested in the old media.

Kids who function with ease in the hyperlinked, multimedia world of the Internet, find books a tough and boring slog.

It also explains why schools are struggling to teach print-based curriculum while the entire structure of human knowledge is being rewritten at the speed of light outside the classroom.

"Oral tradition is a technology of communications just as the Internet is technology of communications," says Foley. Print is technology too, but oral traditions and the Internet have more in common with each other than either has with print.

Foley postulates that "text is not the most natural way for humans to communicate."

It's not likely that books will disappear but people will have to develop multiple literacies to function in the future.

The traditional media is not aware of the ease with which the new media users can operate in a sometimes baffling electronic environment where every piece of information chosen leads to more choices and the experience of navigating is different every time.

"The new media users are native to the technology," says Foley.

On-line publishing techniques are now being used to bridge this gap.

The Pathways Project (www.pathwaysproject.com) encourages analysis and creation of oral traditions in new media by exploiting the greatest strength shared by ancient and modern information technology: open source content creation and interactivity.

Pathways includes a morphing book in a instant state of revision by the readers-users.

This interactivity is the key to the success of the new media. With the old media, the only interactivity we can have is writing a letter to the editor and hoping he or she will publish the carefully edited version of it in the next few days.

With the new media there is instant response and dialogue.

Editors of newspapers are recognizing this. For example, many papers now have their reporter take along a video camera to an assignment.
They shoot a roughly assembled video load it up on the newspaper's website and then follow this up with a detailed story the next day.

This, too, is in the tradition of oral communications but uses the new media to accomplish it.

Photo:  Rob Lee. Creative Commons License Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic

If there ever was any doubt about the power of the new media, this can be dispelled by looking at the way the McCain and Obama campaign committees are using the new media to get their messages across and to establish dialogue with voters.

Traditional media is easy to measure in terms of audience reach but not in terms on how it is affecting your intended audiences.

The new media provides instant feedback to the candidate.

Web sites provide raw numbers in terms of "hits" - how many times the site is being visited but also provides an opportunity for site visitors to comment on what he or she thinks about the campaign, to offer suggests for change, new ideas and responses to the position of the other candidate.

Both the Obama and McCain sites are using the most up-to-date and sophisticated technology.

Let's look at some things on Barrack Obama's site, www.barackobama.com. Obama himself does NOT write this blog. It does however work at being current and update with the latest stories and breaking events.

First off, his site has a date and time on it - this is critical. In a fast-moving political environment, you cannot be seen as being yesterday's news.

That will make you part of the "old" media - like today's newspaper that essentially is providing in-depth coverage of old news.


The blog makes use of current images of Barack and Joe Biden on the campaign trail. There are some excellent photos and videos of the two of them at events conducted the night before or earlier in the day.

Viewers get to see Joe Biden in action by clicking on a Flickr slideshow.  A simple click also takes you to links with Digg, Facebook, Newsvine, Stumble and del.icio.us

On a scale of 1 to 10, I would give Obama's site an 8.5.

The McCain website is also written in the 3rd person but keeps visitor interest high between blog updates with dynamic new photos and videos.
They also refer you to You Tube for other perspectives on the election.

Viewer reminders are posed prominently advising visitors to check back frequently for updates.

When I checked on the Next Page box, I was invited to join Community McCain Space.

It is very user-friendly providing lots of possibility for visitor participation.  This gave me a choice of top RSS (Really Simple Syndication - a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works) on Iraq, health, the economy, and campaign spending.

www.johnmccain.com makes excellent use of the most current You Tube videos to slam Obama.

This is a good example of using the new media to make your opponent look bad without saying he or she is bad yourself, just let the audience be the judge of what others are saying.

I would also give the McCain web site an 8.5 rating.

State and local officials who want to be aware of effective ways to use the new media should become new media "junkies' over the next few months and take some lessons from the leaders of the pack.

Hi. By way of introduction my name is Jim Stanton and this is my first blog for GovTech. I am a former TV journalist, a communications director and director of government relations for a major national organization. Since 1990 I have been running my own crisis communications company (www.jim-stanton.com).

I am very excited about being a blogger with GovTech and for the opportunity to reach out to state and local officials.

The purpose of this blog is to examine the implications of the new media - Media 2.0 - and how it affects day-to-day communications with emphasis on the role it plays when unexpected events occur.

The convergence of three factors; satellite technology, the Internet and Personal Administrative Assistants (PDAs) now provides the ordinary citizen with a means of instant, worldwide, communications at the touch of a button.

What this means is that every person with a cell phone or PDA is a potential citizen journalist.

Traditional media outlets recognize this.

Newspapers are buying radio and television ads to urge local citizens to use the newspaper's website as the go-to location for up-to-date information. Print editors know that people today are not going to wait to get the news in tomorrow's newspaper.

CNN, Fox and the other big three networks all encourage people to become "i-reporters," Internet reporters, and to send in their photos, videos and text messages to the station so it can lead the news.

The under 25 generation doesn't get its news from the morning newspaper or the 6:00 p.m. television news. They go directly to You Tube, the Huffington Post, NowPublic, Facebook and other new media sources.

Examples abound.

In a recent air crash on a remote mountaintop in the Pacific Northwest, search and rescue personnel were lead to the crash site by one of the survivors.  Even though the cell phone component was not working, they were able to text a distress message to his boss.
Rescuers said had they not received the text message information, it was unlikely they would have found the survivors - the forest cover was dense and the mountains were extremely rugged.

An incident occurred recently on a Greyhound bus outside a small town in the remote Canadian prairies. A bus rider attacked a fellow passenger, stabbed him to death and decapitated him.

The world knew about this instantly because of the new media. Within moments of the incident information was sent by eyewitnesses by text message to all the major media outlets and the new media - NowPublic, Facebook, You Tube - and the world knew instantly what had occurred.

Friends of the victims, realizing the young man had not arrived at his destination with the rest of the passengers set up a Facebook site in his memory. Meanwhile, the police, waiting for confirmation of the victim's name, had not notified the family. By word of mouth, the family discovered it was their son who was the likely victim of this horrible tragedy.

In less than a week, 90,000 messages of condolence were posted on this Facebook site from around the world.

This incident points out one of the major concerns about the new media ... no one is accountable for fact checking or verifying personal information. The news is out there unfiltered and in real time.

What challenges does this present to state and local officials? This is the core of what I want to discuss in my blog.

How do agencies that are accountable to stakeholders governed by access to information and privacy regulations, operate in this "wild west" atmosphere of the new media?

The new media is not going away. In fact they are proliferating rapidly. One of the fundamental lessons I have learned in 30 years of communicating to the public is "the organization that gets out first with its messages, sets the communications template."

How do we manage this challenge of being first in the new world of instantaneous communications?

I will be writing a series of blogs to examine the current trends and their implications for state and local officials.

I look forward to having a dialogue with you about the challenges of communicating in the era of the new media.

Let's talk!

Jim