The rise of the real time web

by Robin Grant in News on 24 September 2009 at 16:48 Google+

Contagious magazineSo I’ve been banging on about the death of the microsite for quite a while, but I’d never spent the time to fully articulate my position.

When Contagious magazine offered me the opportunity to articulate it to the world at large, I jumped at the chance. Although only normally available to their subscribers, they’ve kindly made my article available as a PDF (the article itself is on page 5).

The rise of the real time web
What have you done online in the past week? How many microsites did you visit? How many branded Flash animations did you watch? Calculate the mean answer for the entire country and you’ll probably arrive at a figure close to zero. Read on

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  • media140

    We couldnt resist the chance to comment and highlight the event we are running on the 26th October – exploring the future of the realtime web in the context of brands.

    Media140 London
    http://www.media140.com/brands
    Earlybirds at £135 and we have Robin Grant speaking on the opening panel!

    The cheeky Media140 team.

  • johnvwillshire

    Nice article, Robin. Your site here, and the CPB site I think are fine examples of companies creating a home for themselves on the internet that feels… well, alive, as opposed to having being designed by a nineteen year old in Hackney six years ago and updated three times since.

    Whilst you've concentrated a lot on the 'customer facing' side in this piece, I think that's just half the story for a lot of companies.

    For marketing teams used to being 'in control' of all comms traffic from their business, it's a really challenging to think about how they can feel comfortable encouraging all the people who work FOR the company to participate in conversations too.

    I was at the Corporate Social Networking Conference earlier this year (a lot more fun than it sounds) which was full of interesting examples of companies doing this (or at least trying to)… I remember Jadu's work with Lichfield Council making me think 'wow, if a local council can do this sort of stuff… why aren't more companies doing it?

    (Jadu/Lichfield – http://www.jadu.co.uk/homepage/22/twitter)

    A company is the product of the people who work for it; letting all of those people tell the story of your company through your internet site (and in all the other places you mention that people look for things in the article) is, I think, potentially very powerful indeed.

  • http://www.contentandmotion.co.uk/online-pr-agency-services/ Roger, Online PR Agency C&M

    Spot on mate. Need to get clients to stop polishing microsite turds and building cheaper things that deliver interactions and help them build followings… Mega-easy to do, a bit bloody hard to train people to think different – mainly because it means somebody has to staff it. But we're getting there I think…

    Anyways, bravo. Top article.

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  • http://twitter.com/AndreaDenaro Andrea Denaro

    In my opinion there are two point of interest:

    a. how the web is day by day is… real and real ( http://www.andreadenaro.com/the-internet-is-eve… )

    b. how real time stream changes the way we approach content ( http://www.andreadenaro.com/real-time-web-and-c… )

  • http://www.google.com/profiles/andrea.denaro Andrea Denaro

    In my opinion there are two point of interest:

    a. how the web is day by day is… real and real ( http://www.andreadenaro.com/the-internet-is-eve… )

    b. how real time stream changes the way we approach content ( http://www.andreadenaro.com/real-time-web-and-c… )