« Men in white coats | Main | Christmas comes early »
November 30, 2006
Web 2.0 – pros and cons
Alright, enough about Korea; much as I love Samsung, for the sake of journalistic integrity let's discuss something else. Web 2.0 has cropped up again in my work this week, in two very different guises. First a postscript to my earlier post about security issues arising in sites that rely on user-generated content. Finjan also added their weight to the debate in their latest quarterly threat report, and McAfee have highlighted the popularity of video sharing as on the web as a potential goldmine for hackers to exploit, whether embedding their evil code in Mpeg files or using web browser exploits which will hit a poor unsuspecting user as soon as they visit the page.
Piczo, a social networking site for teens, seem happy they are doing enough to mitigate the risk of these threats, with automated systems and a dedicated team monitoring activity on the site. But MySpace and Wikipedia have both been victims in recent weeks and the consensus seems to be either don't let your employees use these sites at work, or make sure you have some form of real time, behaviour-based content security in place.
The next Web 2.0 threat I've been working on is a survey by E-consultancy and cScape that highlights just how much traction it's now gaining among firms eager to exploit the potential business benefits in blogs, podcasts, video casts, user-generated content and all that stuff. But it also tellingly points out that there are still many barriers to its wide-scale adoption, such as lack of boardroom buy-in, lack of skills to make it happen, and lack of financial resources.
Lots of "lacks" then, but actually most of these barriers can be overcome if only the order comes from the top to go ahead with a blog or a podcast. We've certainly embraced this new media here at IT Week; well, you're reading part of it now, and then there are our weekly podcasts – a healthy bite-sized chunk of information technology for your listening pleasure – and of course our redesigned web site now allows visitors to leave their comments on stories. Keep it clean though please people, we're trying our best.
All of this seems to be going down quite well for us, although that's only what I hear – the keys to our web analytics toolbox are sadly kept out of the reach of mere underlings like myself. But as Neil Morgan of – you guessed it – web analytics firm Omniture told me, firms really need to measure the benefits of these technologies if they are going to be able to tell with any certainty what works and what doesn't. And it helps if the people writing the content and spouting forth opinions on podcasts can actually see first hand how it's going down with their audience.
Post a comment