Another meeting I attended on Wednesday was an introduction to Web 2.0 aimed at MicroBusinesses in the Burlington area. The meeting was presented by the economic development office with the goal of teaching local businesses how to take advantage of the infrastructure available to them in the Burlington area. There is big fat pipe called Burlington Telecom and CEDO wants to make sure local businesses are aware of how much they can do with that available to them.
While many of us geeks are already focused on the semantic web, aka Web 3.0, the real world is still learning to use what we have been building for the last number of years.
What I loved about this meeting (in addition to helping to educate the local businesses and what I learned, as well) was how it highlighted the amazing talent that surrounds me in my little state.
The panelists included:
Steve Atkinson, business analyst from a hot little startup called PieMatrix, who defined Web 2.0 for the attendees.
Kevin Shapiro, the archivist for Phish.. How “Vermont” can you get? Phish had a strong online community back in the UseNet days and it was something that just came into it's own and evolved. As their archivist, Kevin delves into a lot of new issues (the whole legal stuff surrounding music/video on the web) as well as cutting edge technology (e.g. creating downloadable formats for iPod videos). Kevin had a live Phish dvd, to show off that it was the Phish online community that had participated in its design. I got to bring that home for my husband. :-)
Ted Adler from Union Street Media, which does a ton of websites for local and regional businesses. Ted talked about Search Engine Optimization which is such a hot topic that I know of two local companies that are each looking for a full time person to do their SEO work. (One is www.dealer.com, the other is www.vermontteddybear.com). I definitely learned a lot from this.
And me, talking about (have you already guessed it?) blogging. I talked about how even huge companies like Microsoft have been able to use blogging to make themselves more accessible and personal. How the right formula can even get a tiny company known world-wide through it's blog. I also warned about not using a blog solely for marketing because people will see that immediately and bolt. I gave a quick overview of how to blog - public sites, your own blog engines, placing RSS feeds on your site so that you can incorporate a blog into your site. On a whim, I even pulled up Dave Burke's Community Server website to demonstrate blog software that you can create a rich website from as well as an example of someone who got to be very well known in his community through blogging.
We have gotten quite used to using these tools for ourselves, but it's important to remember that the tech community is somewhat of an incubator for what can be used in the wider world of business.