SLATES – not just rocks
The term “Web 2.0” was coined in 2004 for the name of a conference organized by O’Reilly Media. It soon became a pervasive way of describing the emerging phase of the Internet, epitomized by popular social media tools such as blogs, Wikipedia, MySpace, YouTube, del.icio.us, and tagging.
Web 2.0 originally described technologies that were primarily used in the open consumer web. However, similar tools soon became used by organizations, both internally to increase efficiency and productivity, and externally to communicate with customers and other stakeholders.
The effectiveness of the use of Web 2.0 can be classified by means of the SLATES model, which is the crux of this post.The model is structured as follows:
S: SEARCH L: LINKS A: AUTHORSHIP T: TAGS E: EXTENSIONS S: SIGNALS.
SPOTIFY
I discovered Spotify last semester, it is an online service that streams music to users and has only recently opened its services to Australia – THANKYOU! It effectively uses the SLATES model to increase the success of the application.
Spotify revolves around its effective Search Engine Optimization because it is imperative that users are able to locate desired songs quickly.
With the integration of Facebook and Twitter as well in the application, makes it much easier to link and share music playlists and create a sense of community.
TWITTER
Unless you have been living under a rock, you would have heard of Twitter or Tweets or Twitterheads! Twitter has taken the world by storm – in just under 140 characters – all with the use of the SLATES approach.
Twitter encourages User Generate Content – authorship. It is important to understand that the more people create original content to more active the community becomes. And this activity level translates to effectiveness of Twitter and its overwhelming success.
The use of tags really brought something different to twitter that not a lot of people has seen before – well I didn’t. Tags refer to the intra-linking of content from within a post, connecting to different parts of the webpage. User are able to place a hash-tag (#) to classify information, which makes accessibility better by categorizing different information. *hash-tag prettyclever*
WORDPRESS
Obviously you know what WordPress is – seeing as you’re reading this blog now. But what you might not have realised is how this website has used the SLATES approach to succeed.
As a user does a lot of activity on the web, clicking on links, reading articles, follow blogs, a rough sketch of the user preferences can be drawn. Extensions use this sketch as reference, the user can be suggested further activities which he can participate in – WordPress does this! “Reccomended Blogs” allow for users to view a variety of different blogs, depending on their interests, which enables WordPress to create a better community. The better the extensions, the better the website.
Signals are the form of reverse feedback that a user can receive from a web service. WordPress gives pingback on your blogs, alerts that comments have been placed on your page/blog and it informs if a blog has been posted on a followed blog. The more the signals, the better it is.
It’s interesting to see how effective the use of web 2.0 techniques with SLATES approach have improved many Enterprise 2.0 system.
Enterprise 2.0 
Hi Alyse,
Spotify sounds interesting I’ll check that one out. I used to use a tool called last.fm (you might have heard of it) to share my bizarre music tastes with my friends 😛
No I haven’t actually heard of it! But it sounds pretty similar to Spotify. What attracted me to Spotify was that I could listen and share music for FREE! You don’t find a lot of that these days!!
This is a really good illustration of the slates model. Having used a couple of blogging platforms I really like wordpress’ implementation of signals for the blog author, updates to the blog post through comments and follows are highlighted on the status bar. Great post!
Yeah WordPress is really good at the signals aspect of SLATES, what I didn’t mention was the emails they send to update you of comments made on your blog – this is quite handy when I’m on my iPhone, I came easily stay in the know!
I’ve learn something new today thank to you. The SLATES model seems to be widely use and also very successful. This model is nice but I can’t get used to it easily as I’m a slow reader. I try to use more social medias I come to me that I am flooded with information. I don’t have time to explore everything and I have less time to read them.
Cheers,
Prapat W.
I agree with you! There are so many applications out there – it’s hard to find and learn about them all.
But I do find that my friends or uni have influenced which ones I take the time to learn about, and most of them I still use today – its interesting how they all use aspects of the SLATES approach too!
Alyse
Hi Alyse,
Three very good examples of the SLATES model here. I personally haven’t used Twitter or WordPress until this semester, however, I have found both very easy and effective to use for this unit. The interlinking and hash-tagging in particular made it very easy to find related information. Looking forward to the next post 🙂
Hey Matt, how have you been?
Yeah I was the same when I did a similar subject last semester, INB346, but found them both to be quite easy to use – and when used together, very effective!!
Alyse
Hi Alyse,
Good write up about the SLATES model with nice examples, I really learned something here.
– Shaun
Hey Shaun,
I’m glad to have helped you wrap your head around the SLATES concept – I think the use of relevant examples can really do that!
Alyse
Afternoon Alyse,
SLATES caught my attention, well done. Solid post and some real functional web 2.0 apps. Tell me how do you feel about spotify being linked in to ones facebook account. How do you feel about everyone knowing what your tuning in to?
Caleb. [http://mrcalebreed.wordpress.com/]
Hey Caleb, thanks for the comment!
Yeah it’s really a double-edged sword – its super handy to share music and discover what others are listening too, but on the other hand I would like some privacy so people don’t judge me, like if I wanted to listen to some One Direction or something haha. But ultimately I think the pros outweigh the cons!
What’s your opinion?
Alyse