I add this post as an extension of the post below. The web is so large and complex and is changing our communication and information pathways so fundamentally that it shows how important it is for your web presence to integrate into the web in as many ways as possible.
Below are the two points that I think are most relevant, but please read the entire article – From New Scientist -
World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee wants to put the web under the microscope to investigate how it changes our behaviour. Paul Marks asked him what he hopes to achieve …
What do you hope to achieve with the Web Science Research Initiative?
The web is now a massive system of connected people and technology and we have to study it as one. It connects people as they make and follow hyperlinks to a degree that results in complex properties no one expected. It has something like 1011 web pages in it and there are a similar number of neurons in the brain.
How does understanding these emergent systems affect society?
Because if you get it right, you can create a new social phenomenon that changes how people operate. Take designing an online market for second-hand goods: if you get the website’s balance of social and technical wrong, or mess up its trust and reputation model, it won’t work. But if you get it right, you create a market for used goods internationally that can affect the price of products around the world because it provides the price of the second-hand alternative. It is a web phenomenon that changed the way society works …
So if any one tells you they fully understand the web … well now you know, they don’t. I think that even goes for selected fields like SEO, search marketing and social media marketing. We don”t know it all, and the parts we do know change often. That understood, it is certain that we should take every meaningful effort to have our website presence able to function and participate while marketing our goods/services. For every field, the era of static, old style “brochure” informational marketing websites has passed.
