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The internet became popular because it was (as it is now) a social network

Marc — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 18:03:18 +0000

At this point in time with so much of our business and income being derived from the internet, it is easy to forget that what made the internet popular was its inherent nature as a social network.

In 1993 when I put my first business webpage on the internet I was getting lots of flame email, every day. Many internet users were upset, strongly feeling that the internet should not ever become commercial. Well it has and now over the recent past with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and others it is now returned a stronger social network than ever.

As far as I am concerned it is great to now be able to combine the social aspect with our websites using the features of web/blogsites. It gives us a chance to truly interact with current and potential clients in all places and at all times. Unbounded by our limitations of staff hours and schedule. It is a great multiplier of our business for low cost and it is always the interaction that completes the sale.

Here is a interesting circa 1993 news report from Canadian Broadcasting relating the emerging value and growth of the internet, then estimated at 15 million users. And the internet’s attraction as a social network. Towards the end of the news report there are quotes from the users of the time speaking passionately how important the social aspect is to them.

The web has complexity equal to our brain

Marc — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 23:19:23 +0000

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.

“Google kicked off my Bludomain site”

Marc — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 14:24:34 +0000

Recently while exploring some discussion boards I came across a few threads like this one on Photo.net having to do with Google dropping Bludomain websites from their search results index. I came across similar threads on Flickr and the FM forum. Unfortunately the problem is not Bludomain’s, it can be any other similarly developed Flash site regardless of provider. The problem is based in the usage of Flash for an entire website.

A picture may be worth a 1,000 words, but not to a search engine. Google and other search engines only work with words. A Flash based site, like Bludomain, is basically just animated pictures. Take a look at the splash page “page source” of most Flash sites, even the most visually appealing. What you will commonly see, besides the page parameters, image calls and scripts, are the Meta tags related to title, description and keywords (a particularly useless tag) and a little text like “Skip intro”, “Website”, “Blog” (terms that very few brides-to-be will use in the wedding planning) and a note that Flash is needed to view the site. This lack of meaningful text content combined with scripts to launch your main site, which Google will not follow, is what leads to poor search ranking and being “kicked off Google”. I have written more in depth previously regarding the weakness of Flash sites’ search engine optimization.

Many photographers and other wedding professionals have discovered the internet marketing power of a blog, and added a blog to gain some internet recognition. A few, like Jessica Claire, have maximized that “blog power” for use as their entire website by creating a blogsite. And this is why I have spent the last few months developing a low priced blogsite for photographers and other wedding professionals (www.ProPhotoBlogsite.com) that can be easily managed by the site owner.

The important take away here is don’t be upset with Google or Bludomain or Flash, they are what they are are, don’t expect them to be different. By recognizing their nature and strengths it becomes easy to see how to use them combined with other options to dramatically improve internet results. As a New England sailor once told me, “don’t argue with the wind, just adjust your sail”.