Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Feds' Web site gets Web 2.0 makeover

Following WhiteHouse.gov's lead, USA.gov upgrade adds RSS feeds and widgets

Taking a cue from the updated WhiteHouse.gov Web site, the federal government has gone Web 2.0 with is own site.

The General Services Administration announced that it has delivered on a promise to use Web 2.0 technology to give citizens electronic access to government information. The USA.gov Web site now is offering a governmentwide news feed service and a gallery of gadget applications.

"Using these Web 2.0 tools is a huge opportunity for government to be transparent and save valuable tax dollars," said Beverly Godwin, director of USA.gov, in a statement. "Tools such as RSS feeds and gadgets allow the public to directly access content from the original source, no matter which Web site they're on. It reduces duplication across government, because an agency creates content once and makes it available for reuse by others."

Last week, users got their first view of the changes on the WhiteHouse.gov Web site when it went live during President Barack Obama's inauguration ceremony. The Web site not only switched over to represent the Obama administration, it also was updated with a new design that focused on new media.

For example, the White House site now has a feature called The Briefing Room, where users can read the latest White House blog posts and even sign up for e-mail news updates.

Additions to the USA.gov Web site include the Government News Aggregator, which is designed to use RSS feeds to deliver news and information from across the federal government. People can subscribe to RSS news feeds, which are based on NewsGator technology, on a variety of topics, including agriculture, economics, recalls, foreign affairs and science and technology.

Another new tool on the updated USA.gov Web site is the Government Gadget Gallery, which features a collection of gadgets or widgets that are created by experts from across government. The gadgets are online tools that can be embedded in individual home pages and blogs. One, for instance, is the Food and Drug Administration's drug finder widget, which is designed to help people search for specific information about medications. Other widgets include one that delivers an environmental tip of the day and another from the FBI that updates information on predators and missing persons, according to the GSA.

Saturday, January 10, 2009

Warner Music adding social networking to websites

After years of watching music fans flood online social networks to interact with their favorite recording artists, the music industry is starting to get serious about adding community features to its own websites.

Hoping to become a big player in that effort is networking giant Cisco, which during the Consumer Electronics Show, January 8-11 in Las Vegas, introduced its Eos platform -- a set of hosted online tools designed to enable media and entertainment companies to build social networking functions into websites.

For record labels, that means adding fan community services to artist sites. Warner Music Group (WMG) is the first label partner signed on to use the Eos platform, and it already plans to add such functionality to the sites for Atlantic artists Laura Izibor and Sean Paul. Other artist sites will migrate to the platform over the course of the year.

"As the Web shifts from the enterprise to the consumer in terms of where the traffic is coming from, the social media revolution -- which is all about fans interacting with artists -- is going to provide an enormous opportunity," said WMG executive vice president of digital strategy and business development Michael Nash. "This is a recognition that having a social media strategy is not just about partnering with social networks, but it's also about what we do with our direct-to-consumer efforts."

Eos features include data analytics, content management and site administration capabilities, but it's the social networking that gets Cisco's foot in the door. That a company the size of Cisco is dedicating an entire division of resources to the effort speaks volumes on how significant an opportunity it expects the field to present in the years ahead.

According to the company's internal market research, 36 percent of fans seek entertainment content directly from the branded site of the provider -- be it a music artist or a TV show. Today, that traffic is largely promotional, with few opportunities for fans to interact the way they do on MySpace or Facebook.

Several site development tools with a social networking focus have been around for years, particularly one called Ning, which powers several existing artist-focused social networks. But outside of a few pioneering artists like 50 Cent and Kylie Minogue, few labels or artists have made much of an effort to turn it into a standard practice.

"A lot of the interaction around artists occurs on MySpace or Facebook, where neither the label or the artist particularly monetizes those types of things," said Dan Scheinman, senior vice president/general manager of Cisco's Media Solutions Group.

xactly how WMG or other labels plan to monetize their artists' sites using the platform remains to be seen, but Scheinman said it will build the system with online advertising and sponsorship models in mind.

"This is really about managing these websites as businesses," Nash said.

Reuters/Billboard



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