Gawker 
Jul 25, 2006 2:45 PM
397
Step right up, folks! Get yer palm read and your cards taroted by the Web 2.0 psychic! What's your sign? Is Omnidrive ascendant in the house of TechCrunch? Dion Hinchcliffe (OMG perfect name) has the answer!
This consultant just published his "Summer '06 Web 2.0 Advisory," and boy is it a doozy, and a real treat for anyone who's ever browsed the Skeptic's Dictionary. After the jump, see if you can spot these signs of a charlatan in Guru Dion's "Advisory".
- "Barnum statements": vague and always-true statements like "Sometimes you're sad" or "There is a man in your life you're uncertain about," used to earn trust
- Counter-examples used as examples: Using, say, miserably failed ad campaigns as examples of healthy customer interaction
- Vague predictions: Unquantifiable statements about the future, using trend words hedged with "but" clauses, so that any outcome can fulfill the predictions
- Self-aggrandizement: Undue inclusion of the psychic and the psychic's organizations in the prediction
- Anything that reads like a book title: "New New Internet"? Give me a break.
Subject: [FIRST
NAME REDACTED]: Summer '06 Web 2.0 Advisory from
Hinchcliffe & Company
Date: July 25, 2006
4:50:58 AM PDT
Hi [REDACTED]:
You're getting this e-mail
because you've heard me speak on the topic of Web 2.0 or I've covered
you in the Web 2.0 Journal.
It's
the middle of summer and most of us are on vacation or in the midst of
the summer slow-down. So, we thought we'd start to get folks ready for
the fall and thinking about their plans by getting the latest Web 2.0
trends and related events in front of them.
First,
since our periodic advisories have been so popular with most of you,
enclosed is our specially condensed summary of some of the latest major
trends in Web 2.0 in the enterprise. We've also just launched our
premium Web 2.0 advisory service (details below) which can provide you
with the most comprehensive research currently available.
This service
covers extensively the major changes that the Web 2.0 phenomenon is
triggering in the worlds of business and IT. Finally, we're
helping
build out one of the most significant Web 2.0 in the enterprise
conferences ever held on the East Coast, and we'd like to bring it to
your attention, also see below for details.
Significant
Web 2.0 Trends in Mid-2006
Disruptive
New
Companies
Emerge:
Web 2.0 poster child, MySpace, whose content is entirely
user generated, recently surpassed Web
leaders Google and Yahoo from out of nowhere only two years ago. Many
now believe these techniques will be used by startups and existing
organizations to disrupt other industries. For example,
YouTube, whose
content is also entirely user contributed, is now widely believed to
have more viewers than network TV. The power of network effects are
believed to be largely responsible for these success stories and
businesses that can learn how to effectively leverage the scale of
audiences on the Web will be the long term winners.
User
Generated Software:
The
latest sites make it easy for users to pull together feeds, badges, and
widgets to quickly create their own software out of blogs and
wikis.
IBM calls this use of
mashups 'situational software' and here again MySpace and YouTube are
leading the way with large numbers of people. Users are creating
their own experiences and lightweight applications, doing what many of
us we'd wished we could do in IT for years; building the small systems
they need for themselves. We are calling this apparent trend
Self-Service IT, and it will likely grow rapidly.
True
Customer Disintermediation Stays Emerging Tech:
While
the rise of blogs among the younger generation is an incredibly strong
trend this year, using blogs and other Web 2.0 techniques to build
customer communities has only been isolated and mixed in CRM/CLM. This
despite some fascinating success stories including " Dell Hell" and GM's
fascinating Chevy Apprentice campaign .
However, as the emergent effectiveness of customer-driven blogs
continues to grow, the control over a company's brand increasingly
moves beyond the corporation and the implications can be profound and
far reaching.
Web
2.0 Social Architectures The Big Target in 2007: More
and more companies are trying to determine how to positively embrace
social computing with their customers and employees, which has the
potential to unleash a great deal of untapped productivity, innovation,
and value. Yet, the downside can be considerable since
network effects
magnify the good and bad both. Early adopters and fast
followers will be putting these techniques
front and center by the middle of next year, but the challenge will be
to dampen the effects of upheaval while still reaping large enough
benefits.
There
is no world-class, dedicated research and analysis service on the topic
of Web 2.0 presently available. Until now that is. As of
today,
Hinchcliffe & Company has a new premium online and print advisory service
that includes regular published and online reports on the very latest
trends and topics in the Web 2.0 era. I've carefully
assembled a team
of leading Enterprise Web 2.0 thinkers and researchers to help me
create this service and I hope you agree that the effort was worth
it.
With a focus on Web 2.0 in the enterprise, but beyond that to Social
Computing and Consumer Web 2.0 and more, we believe that the advisory
is presently the best source of up-to-date analysis and detailed
research - that you can find anywhere - that focuses exclusively on the
next generation of business and IT. The premier issue
includes
detailed, painstaking researched information of the depth that you just
can't find in the blogosphere or anywhere else:
September/October
Premier Advisory Issue Contents
An executive survey of the Web
2.0 strategies of Fortune 1000 CxOs in the next 12 months
A detailed examination and
comparison of current major enterprise mashup platforms
How enterprises can start
positioning themselves to embrace Web 2.0 technologies strategically: A
Roadmap
An in-depth exploration of how
enterprise SOAs can be adjusted to enable social architectures.
Since you're a
personal acquaintance, I've made available a unique personal referral
code ("redacted ")
that gives you 25% off the retail price of the yearly service for the
next 60 days. This discount is only available prior to the
publication
of the premier print issue in September/October, and will
never be offered again.
What's special about this is that you are encouraged to share this
discount virally, Web 2.0-style, via e-mail or your blog with your
friends and acquaintances. And the more it's used the bigger the break
we'll make available to you on our major events and conferences on Web
2.0 and Rich Internet Applications. Each of five uses of your
personal
referral code gets you into one of our world-class conferences of your
choice.
Web
2.0 in the Enterprise on September 20th, in Tyson's Corner, VA
Held
at the Ritz-Carlton in Tyson's Corner on September 20th, this major Web
2.0 in the enterprise event will assemble some of the greatest minds on
the topic, including Harvard's very own Andrew McAfee of Enterprise 2.0
fame as well as Microsoft's business and architecture strategist,
Michael Platt, and many others. Stowe Boyd, another great Web
2.0
leader in the DC Metro area, had this to say about
the The New New Internet conference.
We're still in the midst of assembling exhibitors, companies for a very
exciting Web 2.0 startup competition with a panel of leading VCs, as
well as the all-star cast, so contact me if you want more
details.
Please visit our full events page to
see more information, obtain coupon codes, and view all of our Web
2.0/New Internet events including the AjaxWorld Conference and Expo in
Santa Clara in October.
And
that's it for now, I do hope to hear from you and how you're doing if
we haven't spoken recently. Let me know what you're up to in
the Web
2.0 space!
Note: If you
don't like these e-mails clogging up your mailbox, just let me know and
I'll stop sending them.
Best Regards,
Dion
Hinchcliffe
President
and CTO
Contact information for this author is not available.
