Web 2.0 and the social influencers

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

 
By Daniel F. Pigatto

Jan Dennis, Business and Law Editor @ UIUC has a nice article on web 2.0 user influence - Study: Web sites influence users, even when they don’t communicate directly. Mi Xia, BA professor says " the seemingly impersonal voting, tagging, ratings and even music catalogs offered on so-called Web 2.0 sites can influence users, not unlike more traditional written commentaries posted on blogs and in chat rooms.". This new method of communicating with each other without really interacting may be termed as "ballot box communications", where you can know what’s really popular and what other users are thinking without communicating directly with the users. If you see the trends of social influencing you can see it everywhere - in news, in videos, in images, in social networks, in music and in general all over the web. In other words also called as ‘Memes:

A meme (pronounced /miːm/), as defined by memetic theory, constitutes a theoretical unit of cultural information, the building block of culture or cultural evolution which spreads through diffusion propagating from one mind to another analogously to the way in which a gene propagates from one organism to another as a unit of genetic information and of biological evolution.[1] Multiple memes may propagate as cooperative groups called memeplexes (meme complexes).

As more and more people are shifting from paper to screens and becoming the digitial natives, the trend of onlien social inflluence would grow. No longer people, people keep pages to themselves, they act and they influence. The influence need not be limited to clicks and views but it also spreads through blogs and slashdot like communities, where the topic is discussed online as it would be discussed in an offline world. Researchers are taking a note of this trend and are advicing the businesses to not just to look at the ‘elite influencers’ and also involve these normal public who are now the ’social influencers’. You may wait endlessly fot that ‘tipping point and completely miss the social trend that these social influencers propogate.

Popularity: 4% [?]