Business Blogging

I was giving a presentation to some of my colleagues today, going over the basics of what Web 2.0 means for us as a PR agency, and one of them asked the following question: “There are so many new sites and platforms coming along every year, how do we know which ones we’re supposed to pay attention to?”

It’s a valid question, but the answer is simple: You can’t, so don’t bother trying. The internet is full of Bandwagoneers and Me-Too Merchants, if you tried to track every single start-up and predict which ones would be successful and, moreover, useful from a PR perspective, you’d go mental.

The good news is that there’s practically no advantage to being on the bleeding edge of Web 2.0 development. If you want to impress the client with your encyclopaedic knowledge of the very latest social media platforms, that’s all well and good, but there’s no point pretending that any of them have much to offer until they’ve reached some sort of critical mass in terms of users.

There’s a lot of pressure in the tech industry to constantly be on the leading edge, and that’s no bad thing because it’s always a good idea to know what’s coming over the horizon. But as far as PR is concerned, where’s the advantage? If that hot new start-up you read about really is the next Facebook, then it’s not going to be very useful to you until everybody else agrees with that assessment, and it’s still going to be around in six months time.

Venture capitalists may have to break a sweat trying to figure out who tomorrow’s winners are going to be, but in the PR business it’s our job to figure out how we can put these platforms to work for our clients, only after the markets have chosen the winners.

You might know Six Apart as the company behind various blogging tools and platforms such as Movable Type and LiveJournal. This week the company boldly announced that it was “Opening the Social Graph” which all sounds very impressive and Web 2.0-ish, but probably means absolutely nothing to average Joe Webuser. I’ll try to decipher the announcement as best I can, but please feel free to correct me if you think I’ve misinterpreted.

Let’s start with ‘social graph’ – your social graph describes the complex array of relationships you have with other users of the various social media platforms you use. That includes all your Facebook friends, the people who comment on your blog, the bloggers who you leave comments for, Digg users you chat with and so on. At present, the social graph is more of a concept than a tangible thing – it only really exists in the form of a bunch of different website accounts, but it’s mostly managed in your head rather than by any one service or technology.

What Six Apart is announcing is a set of open source technologies which will make your social graph easier to manage. Imagine if you didn’t have to set up a new account every time you wanted to comment on a blog or join a new site like Flickr or YouTube. Instead, imagine that you have a simple tool that you can use for managing your online identity and the online relationships you have with different websites and other people.

OpenID is the technology which will make this happen – the project originally started life at LiveJournal, and has now taken on a life of its own as an open source platform, but Six Apart is still very much involved in its development, and pushing more people to adopt it as a standard for online identity management.

The meat of what Six Apart is announcing here is a kind of proof of concept demo based around OpenID and various other technologies (which I won’t go into, because it would take up too much space, and I can’t be bothered to do the research) which allows you to manage all of your social networks from one place. Think about that for a second –you’ve got accounts on Digg, Facebook, YouTube and who knows what else, not to mention a dozen or so blogs scattered across various platforms, all requiring separate logins and individual management of your relationships within those online locations. What Six Apart wants to do is allow you to do all of that stuff in one place.

Furthermore, you might want to manage multiple identities for different parts of your online life – keeping your professional and personal identities separate is an increasing concern for a lot of people. Again, Six Apart is talking about providing the tools which make it easy to do that from a single locations and this leads onto giving users greater control over their privacy.

This can all be quite complicated stuff when you get right down to the technical nuts and bolts – most people aren’t going to be interested in all this low level detail. Nevertheless, it’s got the potential to lead us in some very interesting directions and significantly change the way we all use the web, so it’s worth paying attention. If nothing else, I recommend you run through the example videos on Six Apart’s site, since they provide an easy to digest demonstration of how this kind of stuff might work for end users in the real world.