Over the past three years, Internet web sites have been evolving into a series of platforms organizing content and communications among individuals and organizations for the purpose of social networking. Sites like MySpace, YouTube and Wikipedia have shifted online activities from “browsing” to collaborating, interacting and personalizing. MySpace boasts over 100 million accounts, YouTube serves an average of 100 million video streams per day and Wikipedia contains over 1.7 million articles in English edited by users from all over the world. As a result, web design and organizational thinking in this new era needs to be more focused on building event-driven experiences, rather than simply designing information silos ammended with numerous hyperlinks. But how do consumers and businesses keep up with these changes and more importantly how do they exploit the new technologies in ways that benefit customers, employees, and even their industry? This issue of Educational Update is designed for that very purpose.
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