How To Be A Successful Web 2.0 Puppet master

One of the key characteristics of Web 2.0 is participation, collaboration and moderation through the use of web applications. Web 2.0 sites derive their power from the human connections and network effects from this characteristic that is made possible, and grow in effectiveness the more people use them.The idea of “participation, collaboration and moderation” can take many forms. If you look back history, bulletin boards are one form, online forums are another, online multiplayer games, content management systems (e.g. Wikis, Joomla), dating sites and classifieds as well.

If not for features that enable multiple users to create their own space within a website via registering accounts or at least leave a message (like a comment in a blog), the communication culture would have been one-way (from the webmaster to the visitors) and remain stuck in 1.0. On the other hand, the webmaster desires to build up a core group of active participants who unconsciously help to sustain the ‘liveliness’ and therefore the longevity of the website and its agenda or interests while the overall database of users expand. In this manner, a lot of the effort that goes into building the database (or list) becomes very much hands-off for the webmaster. There’s leverage. This is also where moderation comes in. The role of the webmaster naturally becomes that of the moderator, whose job is to maintain some semblance of order (but not to the point of creating a restrictive environment) and general site maintenance. It gets better when the webmaster can promote participants into moderators themselves, and more and more s/he becomes the “silent puppetmaster” behind the scene without doing much.

Last 10 posts by admin

Comments are closed.