Last week, the online community of soccer fans, My Football, bought an English soccer club. The community has 20,000 members, each paying $80 to join, and with a combined bank balance of over $1.5m, they’ve managed to purchase a 51% controlling stake in Ebbsfleet United. The community will now vote on issues such as team selection, transfer targets and other management issues. Fans will be decide who performed well and who should be taken off the bench, and the new Head Coach (formerly known as ‘the manager’) will make the agreed changes to the team. This is Soccer 2.0.

www.myfootballclub.co.uk

The 2007 Federal Election saw the debut of a new political party – the SOL Party, or Senator On-line, described as “Australia’s and the world’s first exclusively online federal political party”. Launched in early October, the party has been approved by the Australian Electoral Commission, has 500 foundation members, and is fielding two candidates in each state. Their mantra is simple: “we do what you tell us”. When a Bill is passed before parliament, SOL’s members will be able to vote online to decide the outcome of the action. This is Politics 2.0.

www.senatoronline.org.au

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, traditional media ceased to operate – but journalists still had net access using laptops and wireless connections. NOLA.com (the online home of the New Orleans Times) thus became the official home of Katrina news, with writers and bloggers posting real time updates. As family and friends outside of the city received distress calls or text messages from those caught in Katrina’s wake, they relayed those messages to NOLA.com, who posted the information on the blog. Those posts were then in turn monitored by rescue teams, who sent in teams to save those indivudals. One reader – whose friend was rescued via this method – later said: “The site has been quite a life saver -- and I truly mean a life saver”. This is Search & Rescue 2.0.

www.nola.com/katrina

Why do I keep using this term 2.0? While 2.0 means many things to many people, at its most basic level, 2.0 means quite simply, taking things to the next level – and using the web as the integral component of that shift. As we’re here at the Community Broadcasting Conference under the banner of “taking community media to the next level”, let’s consider what we might mean by Community 2.0 and how we might use the web to get us there.

We’ll look at:

• A Definition of Web 2.0
  
• Examples of Web 2.0 Sites & Applications
  
• Parallels Between Web 2.0 & Community Broadcasting
  
• The Impact of Web 2.0 on Society & How We Might React

Web 2.0 can mean many things to many people, but I believe there are three key underlying principles:

One: Participation

Web 2.0 is the next generation of the internet, and is driven by the principles of collaboration and participation. And that is absolutely key – collaboration and participation. Where traditionally the web was a one-way street, where we just read web pages and could do no more, Web 2.0 allows us to enter into a dialogue, in a way that is significantly more meaningful than the forum posts of yesteryear. This advanced participation allows for deeper understandings and for more complex relationships to form, through our ever-expanding online social and business networks.

And whereas cost hitherto restricted media creation to the hands of the few, it is now very much in the hands of the masses. We are all now theoretically content makers – from the photos we take at parties, to blog posts about the Federal Election, we have moved from being a consumer to what has been called the ‘prosumer’ (the producer - consumer).

Two: Portabilty

In the web 2.0 world, “the web is the platform” – our life is moving from the desktop to the web. Think about the collaborative tools we use today – email, office documents, events calendars, address books, photo albums: there are online equivalents for all of these things, and much more besides – the result being that you no longer need to be at your desk to access those tools, you can access them wherever you want, whenever you want. And, just as important, we can choose to share that data (or parts thereof) with friends and colleagues. On top of all that, there’s the mobile revolution - and the birth of the iPhone is just the start of a overhaul that will take make web browsing fully mobile to the vast majority of us, the effects of which can not be understated.

Three: Power

As web 2.0 allows monologue to turn to dialogue, the balance of power of shifting from the power-brokers to the audience, from the centre to the edges. The tried-and-tested concept that “we know what’s good for you” is falling into disrepute. One KPMG analyst recently commented that “the high watermark of corporate and government influence has been reached”. It is no longer feasible for organisations to create “their own reality” on the web – the fake, the duplicitous and the dubious are being weeded out by the combined processing power of the crowd.

We could spend all day arguing about who was the first company to really embrace web 2.0, but the general consensus, I think, is that it was Amazon. Their system of rating and commenting on books, or making recommendations based on your purchases, gives as much credence to the wisdom of crowds as it does to the editorial voice.

www.amazon.com


Then there’s the juggernaut that is MySpace – the world’s largest social network space, which – as of last week – had 210,380,320 registered users. Although there were social networks and online communities before MySpace, it was our top friend Tom that broke the mould and took the concept to a global audience. There are some key principles underpinning MySpace that are worth noting: MySpace is generally regarded to be an public platform, where your profile, personal information & opinions are exposed to everyone. Whilst you do have the option to turn them off, that’s not the philosophy of MySpace – rather, it’s a shop window: a place to create, express and share your identity. It was precisely this shop window aspect of MySpace that got people excited – everyone could get in on the act and use social networks as a global promotional vehicle. Now of course MySpace has arguably become more like MySpam.

www.myspace.com


And as Friendster begat MySpace, so MySpace begat Facebook. Facebook is a different proposition altogether – a ‘social operating system’. Whilst MySpace is a public platform to pump your ego, Facebook is a walled garden, a closed infrastructure into which only your friends and family are allowed. This makes Facebook more like a communication tool (akin to email), more so than simply a ‘place to hang out’ – but imagine an application where you could see who was emailing who, where they went together, what they drank, who ended up with who and what words they chose to express regret in the morning? This is one of the most popular aspects of Facebook – the Friends’ News Feed – where you can track the social activity of everyone in your network. Essentially, Facebook clusters together many small communities within the broader social network umbrella – your work, your school, your college, your past life you’d long since forgotten. It is without doubt the most impressive social platform we’ve seen to date – its functionality is actually of use, and it arguably enhances and enriches our contact with one another.

www.facebook.com


For all the talk of ‘user generated content’ across the web, YouTube is where the majority of content exists. 10% of all Australian data traffic has been attributed to YouTube – that’s all emails, all web sites, and all the little packets of data travelling across our national network. 10% of all that is YouTube. It is a global media empire – content made for and by the people, the ultimate democratic media platform. It is also the place where the meritocracy of the web is seen at its best – where content rises to the top based on not only number of views, but also on the user-centred rating system: most rated, most favoured and most commented are just some of the folksonomies that are being employed. But it’s all just kids posting dumb skateboard clips, right? In fact, a recent survey showed that people over the age of 45 upload more video content than 25-34 year olds, who in turn upload more than teenagers.

youtube.com


More than just a glorified photo album, Flickr was one of the first web 2.0 sites to promote the use of tagging. As photos are uploaded, we’re encouraged to give them tags – so tags for this presentation at the CBAA Conference might include Melbourne, sebelhotel, cbaa, stuartbuchanan, presentation, web2, flickr, etc. And once we’ve tagged our own photos with all these things, we can see who amongst the entire community of Flickr users has also tagged photos with the same information. And whilst that’s impressive, the beauty of this system is not necessarily where the concentric rings overlap, but that we’re able to discover a whole world of things that we never knew existed. If we can make a connection based on one common interest, what other things does that person like that I might also be interested in?

www.flickr.com


Wikipedia is home to 9 million articles in 250 languages, the user-generated encyclopaedia that has all but put the Encyclopaedia Britannica out of business - arguably a repository which holds the amassed sum of human knowledge. There’s a key difference though between Wiki technology and Wikipedia – the latter is just one iteration of the former. The concept of a central, communal information pool that can be openly edited and upgraded by its community of users is just as powerful as the content in Wikipedia itself. There are of course Wiki-sceptics who chastise the site for its ease-of-hack and take issue with its accuracy – to do so is to miss the point. Wikis are the wisdom of crowds – and if there’s a gap or a bug in the information, the crowd will surely find it. We’re seeing more and more uses of wikis outside of the Wikipedia framework – and as the concept of wiki as a business or enterprise tool catches on, we’re only just seeing the start of what wiki are capable of.

wikipedia.org


Blogger / Wordpress – two examples of free-to-use blog software, empowering literally millions of bloggers world-wide by offering a simple, free-to-use platform that allows anyone to carve out their own presence in the blogosphere within minutes. From party politics to party-planning, footy to foot fetishes, there’s a blog for, and by, everyone. Blogging has became the de facto platform for promoting one’s own opinions on the world stage, however it can be more than just a soapbox - there are scores of examples of blogs being put to great civic use, and millions of ‘citizen journalists’ are avidly watching the watchers. The blog aggregator Technocrati is now tracking over 70 million active blogs, with 120,000 being created created each and every day. That’s 1.4 new blogs being added every second, and with 1.5 million posts being published each day, that’s equivalent to 17 blog posts worldwide every second. Here’s another killer stat – the doubling, the growth that saw blogs rise from 35 million to 70, took only 320 days.

www.blogger.com

wordpress.org


Delicious & Digg – examples of social bookmarking. We’ve all bookmarked our favourite sites from within our own web browsers, now delicious and dig let us share them with the world. And again this taps into the beauty of the tagging system which was popularised with Flickr – as we find a user that has bookmarks in common with us, we’re instantly fascinated with what else they might have hidden away inside their list of favourite web sites. Delicious also has a wonderful way of presenting tags in what has become known as the ‘tag cloud’ – an easy visual reference for looking at the tags, with the most common tags appearing larger on the page than the less common counterparts.

del.icio.us

digg.com


LibSyn, Odeo and iTunes are all podcast hosts or aggregators – we’re all familiar with podcasts and the dilemma they pose: industry savior or industry killer? In an era where anyone can technically be a broadcaster, listeners will still drift to good content, good production values and good presentation technique. If that’s what we can provide as community broadcasters, then we’re ahead of the game. If we can’t, then the future looks a little less certain.

libsyn.com

odeo.com

www.apple.com/itunes

If you’re thinking it’s just a fad, and that it will all be over by next Friday, perhaps some numbers might help:
European statistics show that 128 million people, 56% of European internet population are active on social networks.

In the UK, that figures escalates to 78%. The most active social network users (the top 20%) make 70 visits per month, spending around 22 hours on the network and clocking up around 3000 pages each.

In May 2007, Facebook, served 15.8 billion pages, with the highest growth rate of users (181% increase year-on-year) being the 25-34 demographic. User numbers for 35+ age group doubled, with 18-24 year olds showing the least growth (at 38%).

As for video content, 75% of all American internet users watched an average of 158 minutes of online video in May, swallowing 8.3 billion streams in just 31 days.

And what about us here in Australia? There are over 15 million internet users, double the number of people that listen to community radio in a month. Keep that 7.5 million number in mind, while we consider some Australian YouTube stats.

Australian user “Community Channel” has logged 1.8m views with 42,000 subscribers registered to receive her latest video posts. Tasmania’s “Emmaline” had around 880,000 hits on each of her video blogs before shutting down her initial account due to over-exposure (she re-started in a slightly more low-key fashion earlier this year). But the gold medal goes to Sydney’s “JuanMann”, the inventor of the ‘Free Hugs’ campaign, one of the most viewed YouTube clips of all times – last week, the clip clocked in at 20,229,990 views – three times the combined national monthly community radio audience.

So we know who the key players are, and we know how deeply the world is engaging with web 2.0 – but what does it really mean to us as community broadcasters? Let’s take a look at how the principles of community broadcasting, as enshrined within our Codes Of Practice, parallel the web 2.0 world.

Democracy, Access & Equity

The principles of participation, co-production and access are key tenants of web 2.0 – the platform is designed with collaboration at its root and access is open to anyone with a web browser.

Inclusive & Culturally Diverse

Internet penetration is growing steadily and there will soon come a day when web access cover all of the world’s habitable regions - all languages, all cultures, all ages will have access to the platform.

Diversity in Program Content & Independence in Programming

The scale and scope of User Generated Content is arguably broader and more diverse than community broadcasting could ever hope to be. With less focus on the authoritative or editorial voice to answer, and often no moderator to filter content, web 2.0 is a platform for all voices, all opinions. The ramifications of ‘total access for all’ are complex and profound and not without some substantial challenges.

Support & Develop Local Arts, Music and Culture

Analysts looking to the future of web 2.0 point to the growth of ‘hyper-local’ – events, people and places overlooked by traditional media, often occurring at a local level, given exposure by the ever-growing pool of bloggers, content makers and citizen journalists.
As you can see, all of us are already participating in activity that is closely aligned (if not identical) to the principles and philosophy of web 2.0. Now we need to consider how we might use these tools to better engage with our communities of interest and become ‘next level’ community broadcasters.

I’m sure you’re thinking that it all sounds like a ridiculous amount of work, and a huge learning curve to climb, in order to engage with the web 2.0 world, and – yes- it can seem daunting at first, but the returns for your station and your volunteers are significant. Let’s look at the ways web 2.0 can rewrite the map of community engagement:

The Audience

Web 2.0 offers us the ability to deepen our relationship with our existing audience as well as forging new links with new listeners. Bringing listeners, old and new, onto a web 2.0 site for your station will give you a better understanding of who they are, what they do and what they care about. Whether that’s through profiles, blog comments or content they upload to the site, their interaction with the station will move beyond the anonymous telephone talkback segment and into a more personal arena. Your web site can also enhance the relationship you already have with your community of interest, by offering a communal space for people to come together, to share stories, ideas and experiences and thus enrich your station’s outreach. Be mindful though – to get the most out of this participatory environment, you have to get your hands dirty. You will need to be active within the online community, stimulating discussions, responding to comments, monitoring content and fostering links between people – this can all take considerable time and effort, but your station will be all the better for it.

Volunteers

The users of today are the volunteers of tomorrow – keep an eye out for those site users who are making regular comments, who update their profile often, who upload content and engage deeply with your site. Those are the people who care, and perhaps even care enough to actively volunteer – either at the station, or as an online web-helper.

Program Makers = Content Makers

Your program makers are already experts in making ‘content’ – the program that currently goes to air is as much part of the new media landscape as everything else. Consider how that content can be enhanced – can it be turned into a podcast and posted on the site? Can it stimulate a discussion on the blog that program makers can facilitate and contribute to? Are there accompanying photos and videos that program makers can upload to the galleries? In the web 2.0 world, the program doesn’t stop at the studio door – it has a life beyond. And given the amount of time it takes to prepare a program, don’t all volunteers want the chance to expand its shelf life (and audience) fat beyond just those listening for a particular 30 or 60 minutes of the day? Web 2.0 allows radio to move from a transient to a persistent medium – where content lives forever, rather than just at ten past three on a Tuesday afternoon.

Administration

Many off-the-shelf web 2.0 products and services offer you the chance to take the drudgery out of current practices, by automating processes and administrative practices. Email lists, calendars, address books, databases – there’s a web 2.0 solution for those, and more. And think outside the square too – for example, you could turn your ‘Volunteer Handbook’ into a wiki, and have the community of volunteers update and expand it for you. And of course, collaborative platforms such as wikis and others, offer the opportunity for remote working, where volunteers located in geographically remote areas can come together online and participate in collaborative projects.

Web 2.0 is one huge mass of activity - millions of people participating in social networks, generating content, connecting with each other, every minute of every day. It’s therefore somewhat inevitable that all of that activity will have a knock-on effect. It could well fundamentally change not just the online world, but the real world too – the here and now. For example:

Participation – with conversations and dialogue happening everywhere, there is a growing expectation that we should be allowed to participate more and more in exchanges that are happening around us. Where traditionally doors have been closed, we expect them to be open.

Democratisation – Power is shifting from the centre to the network, top-down hierarchies are collapsing as the web engenders a growing culture of meritocracy. It doesn’t matter who you are, or what you do, or what social status you have, good ideas and great content will rise to the top.

Government – Web 2.0 lends itself well to the concept of e-democracry, as technology catches up with what democracy once stood for – giving ‘power to the people’.

Open Source leads to Open Services - As the combined strategic thinking and processing power of the open source movement becomes more commonplace, the concept will surely spill over into the ‘real world’ - where people can participate in the development of public services, that such services can be conceived and delivered in an ‘open source’ format with public participation and perpetual development. This is ‘the wiki way’ of developing ideas, plans, documents and resources, all for the public good.

Availability & Convenience: As the mantra of Generation C – “What I Want, Where I Want, When I Want’ – becomes a reality, we submit to a growing expectation that goods and services should always be accessible, wherever I want, whenever I want. The knock-on effect of that concept is staggering and goes right to heart of everything we consume.

Portability: Look at the not-so-insignificant matter of the iPhone –the beginning of the next evolution of mobility telecommunications. The key difference between the iPhone and every other phone we’ve had up until now is simple. It’s not a so-called ‘mobile internet’ with limited content, established & managed by your carrier network – it’s the real deal. A normal web browser in the palm of your hand, enabling you to view any web site, at any time. That shift in itself will be dramatic – imagine having access to all of the content that exists online, wherever and whenever you like.

The Demise of the Authoritative Voice: There’s been a great deal of analysis and discussion as to the place of the ‘authoritative voice’ in the new world order. As dialogue rises, the monopoly once held by the authoritative voice is disappearing. Think about whose opinion you trust on a day-to-day basis – the word of mouth of your friends and colleagues? Web 2.0 has given a new lease of life to the whole idea of ‘word of mouth’, and it has spread to such an extent that there are several studies which show that peer reviews – i.e. comments and notes posted on web sites by users – have as much, or in some cases, ever more credence than the editorial piece itself. I believe we will always authoritative voices – certainly for news and all forms of critique - web 2.0 has simply enabled a broader and more balanced outlook.

Enterprise 2.0: Online networks and content collaborative tools are moving into the workplace – business networking, wikis, blogs, social bookmarking, content sharing etc. When the workplace becomes a more open and collaborative environment, what is the net result for traditional top-down management structures? Will managers still be able to manage in the same way, or will the web 2.0 world of participation and collaboration change all that? Or will it simply allow us to do what we’ve always done, except do it more efficiently and creatively?

The impact of all of that on community broadcasting? My view is that content makers will become more ‘platform agnostic’ and start to make content for a range of different places (programs for radio, podcasts and vodcasts for web properties, articles for blogs etc), and start to make that content remotely.

The net result being that community stations themselves may well produce less content directly; instead they will become a distribution node for a more disparate group of contributors. They become a hub or a portal for community media, retaining the spirit of their original licencing framework, but undergoing a radical, practical reorganization. Where once they were entwined, this split between contributors and distributors has profound implication for the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia and for the entire regulatory framework. If a community group runs on an online radio station and upholds the values of community broadcasting should they not be considered in the same regard as stations that hold a traditional, geographic licence for analogue broadcasting?

The principles of web 2.0 are so closely aligned to community broadcasting that there’s nothing to be afraid of – it does not require a shift in our governing philosophy. The implementation of a web 2.0 strategy might seem a lot to consider, but even dipping a toe in the water can have a profound effect.

Outcomes from web 2.0 can enrich and deepen our contact with audiences, volunteers, content makers and colleagues – moving into an age where collaboration and co-production become second nature - improve workflows, improve communication and improve engagement with our communities of interest.

And, finally, it’s here – it’s in use – it’s being adopted the world over, irrespective of age or experience, in vast numbers.

The migration from analogue to digital, the so-called ’digital revolution’, is nothing short of a massive paradigm shift – where the hierarchies and structures that governed our lives are being replaced by a culture of collaboration and communication. The lessons learned online are expanding into real life, such that web 2.0 isn’t simply a suite of tools that can help us operate in our day-to-days lives, I’d argue that it’s also starting to have a dramatic effect on the way we think, the way we behave and the way we relate to one another.

Getting to grips with web 2.0 isn’t therefore just about remaining relevant in an ever-changing media landscape, or connecting with new audiences and content makers, I believe it’s also about recognising the fact that the very foundations of communications and human relationships are in as process of profound change.