Turning Over a New Leaf
April 2011
By Julie King
This year marks my 20th online, a number that is both surprising and also a bit startling. I have now spent the past fifteen years working online, both as the publisher / managing editor of CanadaOne.com and as part of the Biz-Zone team.
This newsletter is long overdue.
The brilliant addition of Hwei-Ling Lam to our staff, who has over 20 years of tech experience with IBM, has helped prompt me to do a better job at sharing information about emerging technologies and our own solutions. (Welcome, Hwei-Ling!)
I have seen changes come to the Internet in many waves over the past 20 years.
To create some context, in the mid-90's I was thrilled by the emergence of simple web pages with graphics – albeit pretty ugly graphics – to augment the text-only status of the early 90's. The Internet was on the verge of opening up. Soon after came dot-com surge and subsequent crash, an adventure we participated in fully and are proud to have survived. (Still miss those crazy "dot.com" parties!) CanadaOne is one of the few dot.com/dot.ca companies have survived the dot.com crash and our site has only grown over the past decade. Last year we were thrilled when the finally tally on our web stats showed that our site had been used by over 796,000 unique visitors.
The pace of change has slowed over the past decade, but it has been more pervasive. I remember how shocked people were when Facebook reached its first 100 million members. Then last July the site reached 500 million active users, which is limited to members who use the site at least once every week.
No one asks whether the Internet is a fad anymore. Now instead we ask ourselves how we can ensure that everyone has access, as rural communities with limited connectivity risk being digitally impoverished.
And things are accelerating again. We may, I believe, be on the verge of yet another gestalt shift — both in how we use the Internet and its impact on our lives.
This viewpoint was definitely encouraged when I attended Adobe's LA MAX conference in Los Angeles last fall. To quote Abobe's CTO Kevin Lynch:
"This is the 180-degree change, this is a major transformation in how people are using their content," said Kevin Lynch, chief technology officer of Adobe Systems Incorporated, at the recent Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles."This, I think, is even a bigger shift than we even saw with the personal computing revolution."
Lynch was referring to the fact that more people are expected to access the Internet with smartphones, tablets and Internet televisions than with desktop computers by roughly 2014. More importantly, bandwidth for wireless devices is also expect to rise exponentially. While many DSL and cable users enjoy speeds of 8-10 Mbps of download speeds today, Lynch's data suggested that this will rise to 50-100 Mbps by 2015.
So what does this mean? For one thing, associations are positioned to be even more valuable to their members, but to stay relevant it is imperative that they do not fall behind. The message you send electronically need to keep pace with the tools and technologies preferred by your members. That can be as simple as adding versions of your website designed for mobile and tablet computers, to scaling the technologies you offer on your website to create additional value for your members.
What is the best way to proceed? This is a question I have been asking not only on behalf of Biz-Zone's clients, but also for our own CanadaOne website, which has a rich content base yet still must keep pace with changing technologies to stay relevant to our audience.
This is a theme I will explore in the coming months.