In my last entry I talked about pulling together a bunch of Web 2.0 tools for a specific military job. As I made lists of the tools and what they could do I had quite a jumble on my hands. So I began creating categories for them and organizing them so that they were much easier to explain to people who live in a Web 1.0 or Web 0.5 world.

I arrived at the following graphic and think it does a good job of explaining the tools in a manner that will make sense to a broad audience. I plan to use this in a presentation at the Army War College next month and in future presentations and papers.

 Individual

At the center are a set that has been labeled “individual”. These services allow individual users to take action and add their own unique contributions to the world. Social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn allow individuals to express themselves, to explain who they are and share what they want the world to know or think about the individual. These are generally “ego-centric” services. Blogs, on the other hand allow a single author to express his or her ideas to the world. These ideas are not necessarily intended to be authoritative, universal, or binding beyond the author. They center on the ideas of the individual as chosen to express them. “del.icio.us”, Digg, and StumbleUpon allow millions of web surfers to make public their own interest in the web that they surf. The tags that are created do not carry the ideas of the tag author, but rather express the author’s interest in content created by others. A recent addition to this group is Twitter which is very similar to a blog. But, rather than serving as a platform for expounding ideas, it is often described as a “micro-blog” which encourages the author/owner to post extremely short messages describing their immediately current activities. It is like a running stream of to-do list items that are being checked off. At the end of a single day a “twit” (a person who uses Twitter) may have posted a hundred tiny statements of their sequential activities.

Group

The services in the top set are significantly different from those in the center. Wikipedia creates articles that are centered on sharing information. The goal is to allow multiple authors to combine their knowledge to create a resource that is as reliable as a traditional encyclopedia that is created by a few selected experts. This service is said to be “information-centric”. YouTube and Flickr allow an author to post work that he or she has created completely offline and using different tools. These are all about delivery to a mass audience without the intervention of an editor or an approval filter.  YouTube insures that videos of interest to people can remain accessible at all times. The traditional broadcast media (e.g. NBC, CBS, and ABC) have required that the audience watch an item when the networks determine that it will be available. YouTube breaks this limitation and makes all media available at all times. Flickr does the same for still photos. This is a delivery-centric model of social media. Open Source programming projects like Linux and its family of supporting applications, as well as numerous collaborative projects on sites like Source Forge, are focused on bringing together the skills of people who can contribute to the product. These tools are not about allowing free expression from all comers, but are about leveraging the skills of people who can make software better. Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) like World of Warcraft, Everquest, and Ultima Online have evolved internal player guilds that attempt to create a traditional organizational structure from large numbers of independent players. Their goals are similar to traditional business and government organizations, to create entities that can accomplish more by working together than any one player can accomplish alone. To some degree these organization-centric guilds have validated the importance of structure and bureaucracy in achieving larger goals.

World

The figure includes a number of geo-centric services which organize information and activities into the shape of a three-dimensional world. These include projects like Second Life, Active Worlds, Entropia, There.com, and all of the MMOGs that attract thousands or millions of players. These place information according to geography and require navigation that is spatial. In some circles these are not considered Web 2.0 services because they do not usually use the WWW (yet), but they are certainly a form of social media. 

1. By

Adam Little Location: Unknown Member since:1/31/2008 View Full Profile >

adam.little.usa on 2/4/2008
In an environment like Iraq or Afghanistan the majority of intelligence is collected through the everyday infantry units that patrol the streets. After they get back from their patrol they are supposed to be debriefed. Whatever information gaps exist after this process then become the target of the actual intelligence collection specialists. This system works but it highly inefficient, especially when the insurgency regularly makes use of web 2.0 to pass information and spread propaganda. Ego-centric applications are very sticky and are already one of the most popular activities for soldiers in their off time in the war zone. What if the military created a combination of an ego-centric and information-centric platform? This could be used as a means for all soldiers to report what they’ve seen on patrol. By training a couple of extra bodies on what to look for, every BN S2 can become a miniature intelligence filter. This is the way it is already supposed to work by doctrine. However, there is a huge difference between doctrine and reality on the ground. Because of the overwhelming amount of information flow and a general lack of objectivity in BN S2’s the system tends not to flow the way it is designed. Utilizing Web 2.0 could take just enough of the singular human subjectivity out of the picture, and simultaneously cut down on the time it takes to conduct the administrative portion of tactical operations. This is all based off of the ES2 program (every soldier is a collector) doctrine the US Army has been pushing over the last couple of years. My ideas for using Web 2.0 are not a change to this doctrine, just a more efficient method of promoting it. Adam Little SGT, USA

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