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>Welcome to the new frontier
>The accent is on progress
>What have you got to say for yourself?
>It's your choice
>Guide to Online Communications

Anyone who grew up watching The Jetsons on television knows that in the future cars will fly, robots will handle the housework, and you’ll be able to see as well as hear people when you make a phone call. When the classic Hanna-Barbera animated series first aired in 1962, there were 10,000 computers plugged in around the world, each costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. The phone system was a monopoly controlled by AT&T, which dazzled crowds at the 1964 World’s Fair with their visionary Picturephone. At the same time, the folks at the Advanced Research Projects Agency of DoD were hard at work developing a revolutionary communications tool.

Their work paid off. The roadways are still clogged with cars, but today, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, approximately 145 million people, or roughly 72 percent of American adults, are speeding down the information superhighway as the Internet rapidly changes the way we communicate.

Welcome to the new frontier

“The absolute most popular form of online communication is e-mail,” says Aliza Sherman, an online marketing expert and author of the soon-to-be-released The Everything Blogging Book (August 2006, Adams Media). The most recent figures from the Pew Internet & American Life Project back her up: as of September 2005, the data indicate 91 percent of Internet users were sending e-mail.

Sherman has been poking around online since 1987. “To me, it’s about as sci-fi as turning on your TV or radio or picking up a telephone,” she says. Her familiarity has not bred contempt, however. “With any online communication,” she cautions, “there are always caveats.”

“We’re still at the very forefront of this sort of wild, wild west of the information and technology era, and there are a lot of rules that still haven’t been developed,” Jamie Riehle, director of Web publishing for Lycos, explains. He’s not talking about governmental rules and regulations, but about the kind of unwritten rules that can keep you from losing your job or your sweetheart. “Technology always outpaces the development and the advancement of social mores and how society uses technology or uses a medium of communication,” Riehle says.

For example, when it comes to e-mail you have to be careful how you phrase things because there are no physical or voice cues. “People could take what you e-mail them the wrong way because they don’t hear the snicker in your voice or they don’t see you smile,” Sherman says.

To compensate for this deficiency, many people now use what have come to be known as emoticons. MSN describes emoticons as “emotional graphics — visual ways to express the way you feel when words alone just aren't enough.” As with all things in the world of online communications, they have evolved rapidly. What began as a simple smiley face composed of certain keystrokes (i.e., :) ), emoticons are now available in a variety of graphic and animated formats.

The accent is on progress

“E-mail is still the biggest thing out there,” Jerry Stevenson, an independent technology consultant, admits, but it’s definitely not the only game in town. “Instant messaging is pretty heavily used,” he says. IM, as it’s commonly known, is similar in many ways to e-mail but it allows people to communicate in real time.

Real-time communication is also possible with Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services, such as Vonage and AOL TotalTalk. “Voice over IP is becoming a bigger and bigger medium,” Stevenson says. “It isn’t so different from the telephone,” he explains, “Instead of using the old telephone network you’re using the Internet.”

If you are considering replacing your traditional phone service with VoIP, which can provide significant savings, the Federal Communications Commission wants you to be aware that some services using VoIP only allow you to call other people who subscribe to the same service. Others might not work during power outages, and not all VoIP services connect directly to emergency services through 911. Special equipment, such as an adaptor, might be required.

New tools such as Skype, a proprietary freeware VoIP system, are taking this form of online communication to the next level; one George Jetson might have appreciated. Among other things, Stevenson says, “Video becomes part of the equation. So, instead of just talking to someone you’re also able to see them.”

What have you got to say for yourself?

Despite the enhancements, e-mail, instant messaging, and VoIP are all primarily one-to-one methods of communication. Online publishing, on the other hand, is intended to communicate with a larger audience.

Web sites are a prime example of online publishing. “A Web site is a one-way method of communication in that information is posted on the Web site, and people come visit and read that information,” Riehle explains. Regardless of whether a site features simple text or the latest in graphics and flash animation, the information flows in one direction in much the same way as a traditional brochure, magazine or even a radio station might function.

“As you move up the evolutionary ladder of types of online broadcast communication you go from Web sites to blogs,” Stevenson says. The term blog is short for “Web log” and is defined as a Web site featuring personal postings that often provides links to other sites and invites reader comments.

According to Sherman, “Anyone can create a blog.”

“It’s a breeze,” Stevenson agrees, “It costs you nothing if you use a service like blogger.com and you don’t have to be particularly technical to get them going. Literally, you could have yourself a blog up and rolling in five minutes.”

“The nice thing about blogs versus, say, a traditional Web site,” Riehle adds, is that “blogs are by design more interactive. The author or authors are posting fairly regularly, and the viewers are coming there reading today’s update and often times leaving messages. It creates sort of a dialogue.”

The ease with which blogs can be created and updated has made them both popular and problematic. “Because blog publishing is so easy, people don’t often think about what are the repercussions,” Sherman points out, “I don’t think that everyone realizes that when you create a blog you’re basically publishing online which comes with a whole set of responsibilities and liabilities.”

On the flip side, Stevenson says, “We have to become very sophisticated consumers of information now. We have to think about where we’re getting our information. I would be very skeptical of a blog from someone I didn’t know or just came across on a Google search.”

Credibility is also an issue when it comes to wikis. Another creative twist on the traditional Web site, wikis allow readers to add, edit, or change the site’s content in some way. Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia that utilizes the wiki concept, has become one of the Web’s most popular and controversial sites. In theory, volunteer contributors police the site’s content. In reality, as demonstrated this past year when a Wikipedia entry incorrectly linked John Siegenthaler Sr., to the John F. Kennedy assassination, falsifications, whether intentional or not, do get published.

“I do believe Wikipedia is a good source to go to for information,” Stevenson says, but he strongly recommends using multiple sources of information when researching anything online. “You can’t simply trust the first thing you see. You need to verify.”

It’s your choice

Merriam-Webster singled out “blog” as the top word in 2004. In 2005, the New Oxford American Dictionary gave that honor to "podcast" which it defines as "a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the Internet for downloading to a personal audio player." The Pew Internet & American Life Project reports that more than 22 million American adults own these iPods or MP3 players and that 29 percent of them have downloaded podcasts from the Web.

“It is increasingly getting to the point where we can consume media when we want to consume media in whatever format we want to consume that media,” Stevenson says, “If you want to watch Desperate Housewives on your HDTV through your super-duper cable set up or if you want to watch it on the subway with your little iPod on a little screen, you’re able to.”

“It’s very easy to get overwhelmed and sucked in by all the cool new technology,” Riehle admits, “People want to have the best, but there are so many features for a lot of things on the Web and for a lot of devices that are Web-enabled that people don’t need or don’t use.”

Experts suggest that the rapid evolution of online communication will eventually level off. New advancements will continue to be introduced, but perhaps at a more digestible pace. For now, they recommend that you keep your objectives firmly in mind when you venture online. The choice between sending an e-mail or posting a blog entry shouldn’t be made based on bells and whistles. “It depends on what type of information you’re trying to communicate,” Riehle insists, “The level of interactivity has to be considered also. Do you want people to provide feedback as they’re reading, such as in a blog, or do you want just a one-way dissemination of information?

“If you want to just write a quick note to one or to a couple dozen people, e-mail is great because then you know it’s going directly to them,” Riehle advises, “For me,” he says, “the telephone still works the best if I want to get in touch with someone right away.”