Jon Camfield

Thinking about tomorrow’s threats against human rights and Internet Freedom. Frustrated Optimist, gardener, salsa dancer, cook, husband, dad, embarrassed Texan. Opinions here are my own. he/they.

2 minute read

I've been dancing around how open source software, strong standards, and the various web 2.0 technologies actually help your organization out. So let me show a few examples. This blog entry, and in fact all joncamfield.com/blog entries get written once, here at this website. From there, my blog software (Movable Type, tho any good blogging tool or CMS site will do this automagically) creates multiple views of the entry -- as part of a monthly archive, a topic-based archive, and the current blogs on the home page of JonCamfield.com. But that's just the beginning. It also publishes an RSS feed of the story, which itself is read ~2000 times each month through dedicated RSS readers embedded in web browsers, Google's "Reader" and Google Desktop, Thunderbird's RSS reader, and who knows what other feed-readers. I intentionally have stuck it into different places on the Internet. It pipes straight into my Facebook Notes and appears on my profile's news feed to my friends. Using an intermediate site called TwitterFeed, I import it into my Twitter account, and using an embedded RSS reader, it also shows up in my profile on servenet.org.

That's a lot of exposure for a one-time cost to write each article and an initial cost in time to set up the connections. It's this kind of multiplier effect that strategic, appropriate application of information and communication technologies can have, and indeed is one of the best, lowest-cost promises of "web 2.0"