Change is the Medium
Welcome to our new “Our Traction” blog. Formerly known as “ITSter!”, we have re-branded it to focus more on strategies, ideas and initiatives we think our clients and our community could benefit from.
Over the 13 years that I have been working in web development, I have seen many changes in our industry. When I started, Netscape was all the rage and nobody had heard of IE. I remember the pundits saying that online advertising as a revenue source was dead, and organizations should look to other ways to monetize their online activity. Then came Google. The dramatic increase of open source technology took the concept of Content Management Systems out of the hands of corporations that could afford that technology to smaller organizations and ultimately to individuals.
The latest buzz is Social Media, but this time it feels different.
In some ways it is new, after all Facebook and Twitter have not been around that long. But the “web 2.0″ elements of social media (such as Amazon.com’s crowd-sourcing of book reviews) have been around for over a decade.
The new concept that became known as Web 2.0 was that the web could host two-way conversations rather than simply pushing top-down, editorial style publishing. Social Media is simply an extension of Web 2.0. If you think of Web 2.0 as a set of tools, then Social Media is our culture’s rapid adoption of those tools and how we are apply them to our everyday life.
So where does that lead us? I am now firmly in the camp that the way that we do business online is changing fundamentally – and will continue to change, evolve, and test our creativity. If change is the medium – the ever-pressing evolution of new technology and more importantly the ways in which people interact with this technology – and the Medium itself is the Massage, (yes, it’s Massage, not Message) what does that mean for rtraction?
Simply put, it means we embrace the change, and look forward to the challenges that it presents.
Hopefully this new blog will capture the spirit of the discussions we’ve been having here at rtraction, provide some inspiration and provoke some discussion. Let us know.
David Billson, President and Co-founderAs our fearless leader, David spends most of his time finding new work to keep us busy. As the face of the company, he also spends considerable time with clients to identify and find solutions to their communication and technical challenges. As a father of five six, he doesn’t have to look far to find something fun to do when he’s away from the office. Personally, he has a strong sense of commitment to family, friends and community – which are all the same thing in his mind. He brings this keen social sense to rtraction, and has been instrumental in ensuring that the company follows through on its commitment to corporate social responsibility. The most satisfying work moment for David was when rtraction received the HOPE award from the London Epilepsy Support Center. A busy individual, his greatest annoyance in life is simply how quickly time passes. In his own words, “It seems that every time I blink a new month has gone by.”
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