Web 2.0 Challenges Traditional Government Communications

TLDNR - If you're over 20 years old, you probably have no idea what this means. It's an acronym for "too long, did not read," and text messaging users type it to describe most of the information that comes from traditional news sources. These young people want their information now, and they often want it in clusters of no more than 140 words.

Moreover, people under 20 generally don't get their news from daily newspapers or TV stations, not even from AM or FM radio. If they're interested in what's happening, they find out from Google, Yahoo, YouTube and other service providers.

Such services, often lumped together descriptively in the Web 2.0 category, are causing a revolution in the news business as the Internet increasingly becomes the delivery platform for news of all types. This has tremendous ramifications for government operations and government communication with citizens.

Let's look at a couple of examples. In the current Afghanistan war, we see a coalition of Western NATO nations pitted against terrorists who have been described as "cave dwellers." NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said, "The NATO coalition in Afghanistan is in the Stone Age when it comes to many aspects of using the media effectively to tell its story."

In support of Scheffer's statement, NATO Spokesman James Appathurai said, "NATO is beating the Taliban on the battlefield, but they are kicking our asses every single day in the media. They have Web sites, we don't; they release footage instantly, we take weeks."

When an incident happens in Afghanistan, the Taliban uploads a story immediately to YouTube and Al-Jazeera. NATO goes through a ponderous approval process that takes weeks - by that time the Taliban has won the media battle.

Isn't it interesting that "cave dwellers" are beating the world's most advanced nations by using the new media so effectively?

The Innovators
Innovative communicators have long recognized the need to get their messages out using the new technology. While The New York Times and The Washington Post struggle with falling circulation and loss of advertisers, new communicators are moving ahead in leaps and bounds.

One such innovator is NowPublic.com, a user-generated social news Web site. The company is based in Vancouver, British Columbia, and was founded by Michael Tippett, Leonard Brody and Michael Meyers in 2005. In addition to user-contributed content, NowPublic has a content-sharing agreement with The Associated Press. Time magazine named NowPublic one of the top 50 Web sites of 2007.

Let's look at another: Digg.com is a Web site for people to discover and share Internet content by submitting, voting and commenting on links and stories in a social and democratic spirit.

Voting stories up and down - called digging and burying - is the site's cornerstone function. Many stories are submitted every day, but only the most-dugg ones appear on the front page. Digg's popularity has prompted the creation of other social networking sites that feature story submission and a voting system.

The Huffington Post, three years old, was founded by author Arianna Huffington and has 4.7 million unique visitors per month. HuffPo was ranked as the most influential blog in the world by The Guardian.

Search engines such as Google and Yahoo have fundamentally altered how we seek out information; if you want to know something about a person, you "google" him or her.

Wikipedia is a free, multilingual encyclopedia project operated by the U.S.-based Wikimedia Foundation. Its name is a portmanteau of the words "wiki" (a technology for creating collaborative Web sites) and "encyclopedia." It's currently the fastest-growing and most-popular general reference on the Internet. It has become a main source for many young people when they want background information on a person, event or happening.