Posts Tagged ‘building web reputation systems’

In today’s society, it seems that everyone is joining different social media sites like Blogs, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc.  I am amazed at how a person or corporation’s reputation can be changed (for better or worse) in a single moment.  If people like or dislike your service or product, they can post to their blog or Facebook/Twitter status for millions of others to read in an instant.  It’s like the new version of the old party phone lines, where multiple houses shared the same phone line.  Each house had a different ring to distinguish who should answer.  However, people could listen in on different conversations.  In that same way, reputations could be damaged when someone overheard another’s conversation and passed that information along. 
 
I thought about how hard I work to maintain a good reputation and keep my clients happy.  In the training industry (as in most industries), it is critical to do so.  My next thought was that I needed to understand the new social media and it’s corresponding language/vocabulary even better than I currently did.  I decided to do some research and found that I was going to need to learn a completely new language. 
 
From the perspective of a business, my research on social media led me to the term “Web 2.0″.  When I performed a web search on Web 2.0, I had hundreds of thousands of articles to choose from…yikes!  From what I read, Web 2.0 is the way websites are designed to help consumers connect, including sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, wikis, etc.  Many of the terms that were mentioned I had heard of before and had already incorporated into my vocabulary.  However, a few of the words were completely new to me.  Here are a couple of terms I found that were brand new to me.  I am using the definitions from Wikipedia.  It seemed appropriate to use that site since it is part of Web 2.0.
 
Mashup - a web page or application that combines data or functionality from two or more external sources to create a new service.  An example is a real estate website that uses a mapping software.
 
Folksonomy - a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content.  An example is tagging someone in a photo on Facebook.
 
Also in my research, I found a soon to be published book about building your reputation on your website and how to adapt it to a Web 2.0 standard.  It is called “Building Web Reputation Systems,” published by O’Reilly.    It looks like many other people are thinking about their internet presence and reputation, too.  From my perspective, that is a good thing!
 
I had better get busy remembering all these new terms and continue learning more about the web frontier.  I was thinking about trying to learn Spanish but I think I’ll need to focus on updating my internet language skills first!