New links for February 19th
Written by Noah Flower on Thursday, February 19th, 2009
Filed under News
Headlines: A Mobile Phone For Facebook Lovers * Building the Web 2.0 Enterprise * Social Media Saves Lives: Salmonella Outbreak Pushes HHS, FDA, CDC to Get Social * GOP, RSS, and API! Oh My! US Congress Republicans’ New Site (summary and commentary after the break)
A Mobile Phone For Facebook Lovers – On the technology side, it’s worth noting that according to GigaOM “the biggest trend in the mobile industry” is “application-specific mobile phones.” This one is built around Skype, Facebook, Google, instant messaging, and Last.fm. The cutting edge of mobile devices are shaping themselves around social networking software, which means it probably won’t be long before social networking connectivity is baked directly into most of the mainstream’s handhelds.
Building the Web 2.0 Enterprise – The McKinsey Quarterly’s 10-page survey of the corporate uses of Web 2.0 tools, from June 2008, with a great deal of useful detail on which tools are being used, for what purposes, and with what level of success.
Social Media Saves Lives: Salmonella Outbreak Pushes HHS, FDA, CDC to Get Social – You know a new mode of communication has really arrived when even the government is using it. During the latest salmonella outbreak, the sheer immediacy of social media gave the HHS, FDA, and CDC reason to make it a part of their combined communication strategy: “Leveraging social media to spread the word proved to be the point on which the agencies could quickly combine forces… The avenues employed by the agencies included blogs, texting, mobile versions of agency Web sites, online video from the FDA and CDC on YouTube, podcasts, XML files and RSS feeds including “CDC Emergency Preparedness and Response,” social network outreach on sites like MySpace, a variety of Twitter entities like @FDArecalls and @CDCemergency, virtual worlds, and widgets. The various channels carried both breaking news as well as education information on Salmonella.”
GOP, RSS, and API! Oh My! US Congress Republicans’ New Site – The GOP just revamped their website, which now sports RSS feeds and an access point that will enable data-driven mashups. ReadWriteWeb has a review, and their conclusion is that “…the potential for interesting mashups using this data is huge. And those mashups could give us an entirely different way of visualizing the US government at work.” They’re so happy to see it happen, they even get a little misty-eyed about the larger shift that it augurs for our nation: “…the accessibility afforded by the new GOP.gov marks another momentous step forward for the US government in allowing citizens to access information – in near real-time – about the inner workings of the Federal machine. And every step in that direction brings us closer to realizing the true transparency in which the ideals of democracy reside.”
