A real estate professional (a member of ActiveRain) recently asked me to comment on Web 2.0. "... tell us (in dumb down terms) what is web 2.0 and how it relates to us." Describing Web 2.0 - what it is and how it affects (or will affect) the real estate industry is similar to revisiting how Web 1.0 affected you all in the previous century. Did any of you (in 1997) get a dumb-down explanation of the changes that were about to happen in your businesses with the advent of the world wide web? Of course not - there were no commonly understood terms or vernacular available to describe concepts like instant messaging, peer-to-peer computing, SEO, web pages, and the many terms that are now common-place and commonly understood. If someone said to you (in 1996) - "Soon you'll spend more time writing HTML than your ad copy for the Sunday edition.", most real estate professions would have said "Huh?". If someone told you in 1995 - "By 2006 you'll have a half-dozen URL's and 1,000 web pages that you call your online marketing strategy.", most real estate agents would have told that person to get out of their office. So, I'm here to say: - ... by 2009 most of your transactions and conversations on the Internet will be arbitrated through machines, not human interaction.
- ... by this time next year, more than 50% of all web content will be published or accessible in or through XML.
- ... the methods that customers find you on the Internet will increase by a factor of 20 in the very near future.
- ... if you fail to adopt open computing standards (like xHTML, RSS, XML, and web services), your business will be at a distinct competitive disadvantage.
- ... the number of messages you recieve through electonic means will increase 10 fold by the end of 2008.
- ... by this time next year, you (and every human on the planet) will each increase their production of digital content by many gigabytes.
- ... if you aren't gaining awareness of information change through syndicated information sources by the close of 2007, you'll likely be at a great competitive disadvantage.
- ... by 2008 everyone with a broadband connection will have their own radio talk show - it will be called a podcast. ;-)
Sure - these ideas seem preposterous for average business people; but so did digital photography. There are still people that buy emulsion-based film products, but as former employees of Kodak and Polaroid will tell you, there ain't many. Who amongst us predicted that high-resolution digital cameras would destroy a multi-billion dollar film-based industry in less than five years? It happened along an axis of terms that could not be dumbed-down even as late as 2001 - multi-media, new-media, flash-memory, flash-drives, JPG's, GIF's, image files, etc. None of these terms made any measurable sense to us at the time, yet they represent significant shifts in the way .snap pics of our grandkids. Web 2.0 in common terms? Not possible except to say the effects will be very much like Web 1.0 - a big son-of-a-bitchin' earthquake of change and disruption, but probably a magnitude or two larger. |
