Bzzzz – November 28, 2007

I’ve been noticing that there are some new buzz words out there in the sweet sweet world of web 2.0. I try to map these buzz words in context to what they mean to technology evangelists, budding start-ups, marketers, and everyday consumers. You might have seen a couple of my in-depth reports like this on my site before, but this time I’m going to keep it at a surface level. Here are some words that caught my eye:


Crowd Clout –

This is basically a sexy word for democracy. Lots of people converge to voice their views and ask for what they want. New idea no, but technology has really helped bring it to a different level. As pointed out by PSFK, companies such as Eventful and Threadless use this concept to promote favorite product lines. Also noted by PSFK, in China there is a practice called “tuangou” or “team purchase” where hundreds of flashmobbing people descend on a given retailer to get the price they want. Kinda sounds like Priceline.com from it’s beginning.

Like I said, nothing new, however, with technology helping people organize on the fly or in a premeditative fashion, this could be powerful. Really powerful. Calling all wanna be Naomi Kleins.


Zone/Geo Tagging –

This feature is prevalent on many photo and video sharing sites where users can geolocate where they took the picture or video such as Flickr or YouTube. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of time to zone tag countless pictures and videos, and I’m not sure people are going to want to do it for all their shared media. However, if we can convince them to do it, the possibility to combine zone tagging and mobile alerts would be phenomenal. Essentially, you could set your mobile device to locate zone tagged stuff. That stuff could be categorized into topics like food, bars, cool things to see, hot girls, etc. You get to decided what types of zone tagged topics you want sent your phone. Maybe throw a little Twitter in there and we might be able to zone tag on the fly. Hmmm….now that’s an idea.


Fan Labor –


Essentially, this is asking fan bases of any types to create content for the brand/community/organization of which they are apart of. Does this type of user generated content adversely affecting the communities in which they come from. Does offering a reward for their work convert them into mass producers? Do they lose credibility? I’m not too sure this buzz word will stick, but I like it, because I do think companies are asking too much of their consumers in today’s 2.0 age.