October 2006
From the Editor: Web 2.0

Last month I wrote this column about the unbelievable demise of E3. And now I want to tell you how I first found the story. It was a Sunday night, and I was checking my e-mail when an RSS feed from one of my Google news alerts popped up with a story reporting that E3 is no more. Of course, I clicked through to the story, which came from a source I wasn’t familiar with, so I started to do some investigating of my own. Needless to say, two hours later, I didn’t know for sure if E3 had been cancelled, but I was amazed by what I found.

The story had been posted on www.digg.com, which is now the 24th most popular Web site in the United States, according to industry tracker Alexa.com. “Digg is all about user powered content. Every article on digg is submitted and voted on by the digg community,” according to the description on the site. More than 1 million people go to digg daily, reading, submitting or “digging” some 4,000 stories, according to a recent article in Business Week. At 9 p.m. on a Sunday night, 960 people “dug” the E3 story, which had been posted for less than seven hours.

The growth of social media Web sites like digg.com is unprecedented. Youtube.com has grown 20 percent a month, the number of blogs recently passed 50 million and myspace.com membership soared past 100 million, according to a recent article in BtoB magazine. All these sites represent what many are calling “Web 2.0.”

According to www.wikipedia.org, “Web 2.0 refers to a supposed second-generation of Internet-based services — such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies — that let people collaborate and share information online in previously unavailable ways.

If you haven’t already noticed, most major b-to-b media companies, as well as a number of large associations, are jumping on the Web 2.0 bandwagon. They’re dabbling with these features in an effort to enhance their brand beyond their shows and offer exhibitors and attendees (and members and suppliers) a year-round community to interact with each other. They’re using wikis, blogs, podcasts, social software, online collaboration (like BD Metrics), etc. For example, the Supernova conference offers a blogcast, wiki, and e-mail directory among many other online tools (see Making an Online Community Click); dmg world media launched a podcast for its ad:tech shows last fall (see Best Practices: Launching a podcast); and the Consumer Electronics Show produced 35 podcasts from major keynotes and popular sessions from its 2006 show (see Show Business: What’s hot, EXPO, June 2006).

While Web 2.0 sites are more popular on the consumer side, it’s too early to tell if they’ll lead to long-term success for the b-to-b community. But most tech experts agree that these social media services are not a passing fad. And although many of us probably aren’t regular users of these tools, our younger attendees and exhibitors may be. If we’re going to attract to them to our shows, it’s time to learn — and there’s no better way to learn than to join.

Danica Tormohlen, Editor
dtormohlen@ascendmedia.com