It’s hard to understand Web 2.0 without getting your hands dirty, without doing the hard yards. To unleash its card marketing potential, you have to understand its purpose, experience it in practice, get to know the motivations and aspirations of the people who drive it, and are driven by it. In technical terms, you need to ‘get into their heads’ — get a feel for it.
Get a feel for it and you’ll get a feel for the ideas, the ideas that will set you apart and enable you to stay a step ahead of your peers. But where do you start? Web 2.0 is a sprawling mass of this, that and the other. At least it was until Go2Web20 came along.
Wipe your mind clean and spend a week, a day, an hour a day if that’s all you’ve got time for, dipping into all the sites on this online Web 2.0 directory that catch your eye. Not all of them will make sense, not all of them will be relevant, but some of them will. Don’t work through them systematically, in order, like an autodidact; read them at random, in whatever order you want, but above all read, digest and absorb — take it onboard. Be a sponge and let it all soak in. Let it soak in and you’ll get something out.
Oh, and if you want to know which Web 2.0 sites are getting the most traffic, what’s pulling our collective strings, go to Movers 2.0. A lot of the usual suspects are there – Wikipedia, YouTube, MySpace and Flickr – but so are a large number of other sites you, like us, probably haven’t heard of.
To monetize Web 2.0, get to grips with what the people are about and familiarize yourself with where they go.