As I wonder around Wellington lately I started to realise how much Web 2.0+ (2.5, 3.0) concepts and technologies I actually interact with on a day to day basis. After looking into some of the more formal definitions of these evolutions of the web, 2.0 with the web being used as a platform for social interaction, 2.5 with its "mobile" application of 2.0 ideas and 3.0 looking at being the "semantic" web (web that understands what we are trying to find by providing extra data about our context or preferences). Here is a few of the more interesting situations and examples that are not the usual Facebook checking or Twitter tweeting.

I have been lucky enough to have been invoved in the web industry through what would be termed the shift from web 1.0 to web 2.0 but well before the term was coined by Tim O'Riley in 2004, myself and fellow web geeks simply were just trying to push the boundaries as to what we could do with the emerging technology, new scripting languages, techniques and processes with out a thought as to giving it a shiney marketable buzzword name such as the now often mis-used term "Web 2.0".

I mentioned in the last month some of the history behind why Social Media is in an absolute boom at present. Mostly this is to do with human interaction and the our social nature which leads us to find ways to communicate and collaborate over long distances. There has also been a business cultural shift towards embracing these social tools to open up a dialog with customers which is perhaps due to the changing generational mix in the workforce as Andreas Kaplin & Michael Haenlein point out:

It seems that all throughout history, human beings have been trying to utilise the latest technology of the times in order to connect, communicate, cooperate and colloborate (the 4 C's!). When I say technology it might not always be the computers and social networks of today (but I will get to that shortly). Just think of smoke signals, carrier pigeons, the horseback mail courier, the telegraph service (morse code), through to the telephone, finally entering the computer era.

The important thing here is really that humans are social creatures and we are pretty clever when it comes to finding ways to communicate even over long distances. This continues on into our modern computer driven era, if we look at some of the ideas and innovations in communication and collaborative technology dating back as far as the 1940's. From Niall Cook's book "Enterprise 2.0", in 1945 Vannevar Bush, who was then the Director of the US Office of Scientific Research and Development, published his article "As we may think" with these visions of the future of communication:

Well, just when the start of my year couldn't get any busier, semester one of my university study kicks in.

This year I am however rather excited as I will be studying some interesting topics including Social Media Networks for Business and having worked in companies and implemented some Social Media strategies before it will be interesting as to the approach taken by our lecturer and how the theory stacks up to the real world.

Part of the assessment is to keep a blog of your thoughts and reflection on the topics of social media that we study so I will be posting regularly here with my progress and hopefully some interesting and useful information that you could pick up and practically implement yourself.