Currently doing some talks about online buzz and the ‘network’ and thought I would share some of those cute charts I threw together to illustrate a few angles. Firstly though just wanted to get out there a simple view/evolutionary map of the track we are on, the out-of-control train without brakes hurtling towards an always-on, networked speck of cosmic dust, we call home. To warm you up before the here and now stuff, some simple jumps to illustrate this continuum (note: step 12 onwards gets a little space cadet! but you will see the link 🙂 –

  1. The dawn of man, the darkest age, little or no communication
  2. The age of non-verbal, small geographically challenged, tribal/family communities
  3. A common verbal language – communities expand, explore and spread ideas very slowly around the globe
  4. Stories, beliefs and knowledge shared slowly via printed material
  5. Life and ideas from one perspective captured on film and played back to many, delayed and editorialized by a select few
  6. Audio stories as opinions spread by a few, live, in real time, one to many via voice only broadcast, radio
  7. Live cameras connect to broadcast towers and satellites, the world focuses on few to many TV – they also plays stored media to increase stickiness
  8. Early copper internet starts to carry text, audio and grainy video, pushed at computer users – web 1.0
  9. Fiber and faster copper broadband gradually makes all stored content immediately available replacing TV and Radio while computers become mobile
  10. Communities form and connect globally albeit asynchronously, leaving ideas around the web to share and expand – web 2.0
  11. The web becomes more and more instantaneous as text, audio and video are always on, and crude virtual worlds for synchronous co-creative interaction – web 3.0
  12. A fork in the road – part of the world goes into vivid real time virtual spaces as fully rendered, photo realistic avatars, their physical bodies mapped in real time from their physical selves – web 4.0
  13. On the other fork mobile interfaces move from the hand driven mobiles to direct brain (thought) connection – everyone on the planet in real time can instantly communicate with everyone else via thought, prefacing the thought with recipient/s, name, friends, family, country, world and voila – web 5.0
  14. Humanity, connected as one consciousness, takes a leap forward to level 2

OK bit of a jump from Twitter to WiFi brain ‘thought chatter’ connectors between us all but you get the gist 🙂 Back to now, somewhere between 10 to 12 and a few slides I have been using alongside the web 2.0 myth image of last year and a few others to be blogged to help illustrate the wonderfully wacky sharing world of web 2.0.

Wonderful Web 2.0 © Gary Hayes 2008

The first diagram above shows the components of web 2.0 with axes of synch/asynch on the horizontal and one to many and many to many on the vertical axis – all of the components can be delivered to the four screens indicated on the top left. It is primarily intended to show that the blue (text/conversation) and purple (richer media) web 2.0 components are often combined to create a well rounded social network portal. The yellow blocks are messengers, digg and rss which act as glue and navigation.

This series of diagrams below, spheres of influence, below is a quick stab showing at a very high level (read: 101 for newbs) how web 2.0 services cause flocking, sharing and interconnectivity.

Here we have the people (ok my pic of Central Station in NY!), a friend and family core and ripples of connection/separation spiralling outwards.

A metaphoric web over the top – ideally a 3D diagram would make more sense but this suggests a network.

Connections are limited to one-to-one (eg: person to company or property) in a non-web 2.0 world

The addition of three example web 2.0 components of video and photo sharing plus combination social network shows how a flocking occurs as well as more interconnectivity stimulated through those portals. Obviously the components would be interconnected and overlap etc:

Showing how ‘you’ via your blogs, pod and vod casts, tweets, comments and ratings generate links to and from you. The more active you are the more you grow and strengthen the ‘neural’ connections.

A final diagram meant to illustrate the simple idea that once you are established as a micro web 2.0 component you generate specific links directly to you – likely to be niche interest.

Posted by Gary Hayes ©2008