I had a super-short notice radio interview on social media today – the audio is below. Ironic the second oldest broadcast format talking about the latest in broadcast tech..

Bruce

My brother, a friend and I started a bamboo t-shirt company recently as a hobby. The premise is simple – each t-shirt comes with “a month of guilt free (carbon-free!) living” in the form of carbon off-sets (Carbon Karma!) financed through the profits of the t-shirt. The site is still in its infancy. The store is live, but the brand and education website around the sea-saw of reduction and offset is in the works and launching soon.

“Sea-saw reduction/offset” – by this I mean if you work on both reducing your carbon footprint AND off-setting the stuff you can’t or don’t want to reduce by paying/building/planting something that removes carbon from the atomosphere, you’re actually accelerating environmental success. Cause let’s just be honest… no one is going to give up all carbon-generating aspects of life just ’cause the world is dying. So the point of Mad Monkey bamboo t-shirts is to make it easy to be cool and be green.

This is a for-profit company. I endorse the theory that environmental causes are accelerated if they have commercial viability. If there is a profit centre in it, investment money will flow. If investment money flows, innovation and consumer adoption will accelerate. You want to speed up the formula? Focus on innovative for-profit investment-backed start-ups.

mymadmonkey.com

Buy a t-shirt!

Problem: Attended the Web 2.0 Expo (April-2007) in San Francisco; a lot of great insight, but not very many speakers brought it down to the concrete and practical – how can SMB and enterprise use this stuff?

Let’s start with defining some basic fundamentals of Web 2.0:

Q. What is it?

A. Web 2.0 is about harnessing user (user = visitor to your website) generated content to add value to the experience of future users. So basically, if I interact with your site, it makes the next person’s experience richer, and so on.

examples: I write a review, rank an item, share a link, contribute knowledge, vote on a process, edit information (fact check), and so on.

Web 2.0 is about the power of the masses, building community, and self-expression.

Power of the Masses:
This theory is fairly straight forward – the more people you have who perform an action, the greater the ability to determine its true nature.

example: if 1 person rates a movie, you have no idea if it is good or bad, but if 10,000 people do, then you have a large enough data set that you can get a good indication if the movie will suck or not.

Building Community:
Now here is where it gets interesting. Web 2.0 allows for global congregation around any common interest.

example: So 10,000 people rating a movie should give a clear indication if its good or not – but that depends on who those 10,000 people are. Now if the movie is a cheesy horror flick, and the site rating it is dedicated to cheesy horror flicks, and most of the users are fans, then the 10,000 reviews now have much greater context – because the ratings are contributed from like minded individuals.

Self-Expression:
The final piece of the Web 2.0 experience is the capability of anyone, with no technical skill requirement, to publish anything they want at any time. Web 2.0 has put the power of the media into the hands of the masses.

example: so I, you, or anyone with an Internet connection, can, for little or no cost, publish or views, perspectives, or information on any topic we want. These are blogs.

Ok, so how do these all tie together?

First, anyone can be a publisher of words, images, audio and video.

The barrier of entry has been collapsed to zero. Off-the-shelf hardware and software can be purchased or used for low or no cost to create a message in any medium and launch it on the Internet. Where “mass media” had the only access to ubiqitous reach, now everyone does.

Second, mass media curated content only from a select few people, but now everyone with an interest (expert or amateur) and a passion to share that expertise can do so.

This gives greater perspective to the individual knowledge seeker – as there are many more sources to learn from.

Third, in a technically driven world where human interaction seems to suffer with automated services (Web 1.0), now uses technology to create natural communication and conversations – between individuals, groups, and of course entities (governments, businesses, non-profits, etc).

Next post:

The Tools of Web 2.0 – how to use Blogs, Wikis, Reviews, Ratings, Community Building, RSS, and other items. I will define what these items are and how to use them effectively.