I attended an entertaining presentation last week delivered by an NRC Research Scientist - and futurist - who wanted to talk about what he was learning about the coming technologies, the stuff on the bleeding edge, as they say. Most of it was pretty speculative, and a lot of it I could only barely understand - nano-particles and light-emitting diodes. But I perked up when he started talking about something he called UP! - Ubiquitous Participation. We've been talking about ubiquitous computing for some time but this is a little different...not really a future trend because it has been here for a couple of years now - but never-the-less shaking up the business world.

 

UP! is driven by web 2.0, an internet full of connected services and social networking that has brought the web to a totally different place than web 1.0 - or so they say. I could try to explain it all here, but it would take volumes and I'd rather recommend that you get in touch with some authors who have done a much better job of that - like Thomas Friedman (The World is Flat), David Weinberger (Everything is Miscellaneous, The Cluetrain Manifesto) and Don Tapscott (Wikinomics).

 

What I can tell you is that these books speak about a world that is very different for businesses than in the past. One illustration of that difference is the notion of participation - the idea that web visitors are no longer satisfied to simply consume pictures and words on websites - they want to participate in its development, add their own comments and ratings, classify things in their own personal schema of knowledge and interact with others. How is that done? The idea is that the individual has some of that control by creating references to you in their tag cloud (see deli.cio.us), their facebook site, or their blog. If you deliver a regular piece of information (a newsletter for example), it can be syndicated and published to an individual's News Feeds using RSS (Really Simple Syndication).

Where do you start? Well you should consider engaging a consultant/developer unless you really know your stuff in coding your site. Start with some basic participatory practices on your site - maybe include tags that will allow people to add references on your site to their own tag cloud or personal collections; if you provide a knowledge service (advice, tips) create it as a data output that can be converted to RSS; and allow people to comment on aspects of your site - either by rating it, or adding comments. You can create a sort of community on your site in this way.

 

In the meantime, start a Facebook page (www.facebook.com), subscribe to a business network like Linked-In (www.linkedin.com) and start a blog (www.blogger.com or www.twitter.com) about something that provides an opportunity to show your expertise in your product or service area.

 

Don't wait for this "fad to pass" - it won't. Get in there, start doing it and Shake it UP!