Revolution
2.1
By Jim Hedger, StepForth News Editor, StepForth Placement Inc.
November 2, 2005
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The second Internet revolution has clearly started to take shape. Remember
the massive changes forecast by hundreds of tech-writers, including myself,
for the past two years? While slower in coming than expected, the last
critical stage for their mass adoption of these changes, their introduction,
appears to have begun. Welcome to Revolution 2.1.
Revolution, according to one definition offered by Princeton
University’s
WordNet is, “a drastic and far-reaching change in ways of thinking
and behaving.”
Revolutions come in stages, generally brewing for long periods before overwhelming
the traditional order with the weight of massive social adoption of new
ideas, tools and methods. They almost always stem from increased social
or technical knowledge and require the support of a prosperous middle-class
majority to fully succeed.
In this case, that majority is the Internet users themselves. The search
engines are providing the tools forged by in-house and third party software
developers whose creativity formed the framework for the coming changes.
Underpinning the revolution is the virtually universal access to broadband,
high-speed connectivity in North America and most of Western Europe, Oceania
and Asia.
The last thing a successful revolution requires is the need to have one
in the first place. Unless a society or economy is horribly oppressed, revolution
really is a lot of bother and hard work. Why go to the trouble of establishing
a new way of doing things if the old one works?
The current Internet economy works just fine, at least for those who can
exploit opportunities in or around it. A vast improvement on personal empowerment
from the socio-economic order of the post WW2 corporate-economies, the Internet
has provided tens of millions of people the essential tools to become entrepreneurs
and add value to their lives and their communities.
Add the emergence of two billion new users and developers from India and
China to the mix, along with the hundreds of millions in other parts of
Africa, Asia and South America who are also finding easier access to the
Internet and the need to alter our traditions becomes that much more apparent.
Issues ranging from language and translation support to the legal differences
between jurisdictional areas are suddenly on the table.
The Internet as we know it today is actually a massive hodgepodge of applications,
common and conflicting protocols, and clunky client-side software strung
together by an amazingly versatile and efficient routing system. The ability
to collaborate between artificial and human driven intelligences is phenomenal
but, as originators such as Vint Cerf and Bill Gates have said, what we
see today is only the tip of the iceberg.
Yesterday’s quiet but deliberate unveiling of Microsoft’s Windows
Live marked the true beginning of a new phase in Internet development as
the software giant follows rival Google in presenting a host of online services
and server side software for registered users. One giant following another
through a virgin forest will certainly open a very wide path for others
to follow.
In a nutshell, Windows Live has copied Google’s personalized search
portal (google.com/ig) though its layout and functionality is very much
different. Oddly enough, the release and functionality of Windows Live is
not in itself an important milestone. Their contribution to Revolution 2.1
is the adoption of a user and/or group influenced personalization of information
retrieval by the major search entities. Being the second to offer registered
users the ability to create their own info-portal home page, Microsoft is
pretty much ensuring that, assuming users go for it; others will follow
the model in the future.
Microsoft also released OfficeLive, a major and important step forward
in Revolution 2.1. OfficeLive marks a renewed mission for Microsoft in the
development and distribution of server-side software. According to Microsoft
chief technical officer Ozzie Smith, “Internet users have come to
expect services that are fast, easy-to-use – and, in many cases, free.
Access to personal information from any PC or mobile device is becoming
expected, making more users willing to store their personal information
on the servers of companies such as Google than their own PCs.”
Google has supported the development of much of the software that will
power the coming changes. Over the years, the alliance between Google and
the open source community has been widely known. Soon, Google is expected
to be involved with the release of Open Office as server-side software on
demand.
Google and Microsoft are not alone in their contributions to Revolution
2.1. The largest tech-driver of the coming changes is the ability to feed
user-created information via RSS or Real Simple Syndication.
Yahoo recently took a radically different but equally revolutionary path
with the citizen-publisher focused Yahoo Publisher Network.
The Yahoo Publisher Network is a massive initiative in grassroots publishing
that Yahoo hopes will be adopted by citizen journalists and commercial publishers.
YPN is an amalgam of what will eventually be dozens of Yahoo features and
services with the ability to create and mass-distribute blogs. Yahoo leads
the search field in the provision of in-house and user generated content
for bloggers through the YPN. It also offers advertising distribution incentives
similar to Google AdSense for YPN publishers.
Over the past ten years, two general types of information have emerged
from the Internet. One type is academic or social in focus and the other
is commercial or politically focused. The first wants to learn and share,
the second to lead and sell. Up until this point, both have existed in tandem,
pretty much treated equally by search engines and Internet protocols. Quite
often, at least in the realm of general search, the commercial side has
exploited this equality, (SEOs and SEMs can insert a polite but self-effacing
cough here), sometimes pushing quality but non-commercial information lower
in search results than it ought to be.
Concurrently, a new generation of software engineers grew up. Unlike previous
generations, this new bunch has always had computers and the Internet as
functioning parts of their lives. These teen and early 20-somethings relate
to the Internet differently than their parents and even their older peers
do. Like 30-something Gen-X’ers and their love-hate relationship with
PR, mass marketing and advertising, today’s younger net-user doesn’t
necessarily trust everything he or she sees online. Unlike previous generations
however, this young set can immediately do something about it.
Necessity is the mother of invention and frustration is often the muse
of innovation. The Internet gave these teen and 20-something innovators
the platform to build better mousetraps on and the ability to do so almost
instantly. That’s what the hype surrounding Web2.0 is all about.
What they have created is a set of extremely interesting social networking
and communication devices that rely on the input and acceptance of Internet
users. On the academic front, the Wikipedia provides one of the best examples.
Built upon articles and entries written by registered users, the Wikipedia
has rapidly become the unofficial encyclopaedia of the Internet. Quality
control is an ongoing issue however the size and attention of the community
contributing to the project makes the editorial project virtually organic.
In the commercial realm, the newsletter or publication this article is written
in could stand as basic but rapidly evolving example.
As technology and the wealth necessary to use it has advanced so rapidly
over the past decade, tools that make information distribution and retrieval
simpler have emerged. In other words, some clever inventors have found ways
to make search simpler. At the same time, advances and innovations in grassroots
technologies (such as RSS enabled blogs mixed with a/v production to host
podcasts) push the search industry to broaden the horizons available to
users. The major search engines didn’t start the revolution. Their
function is to popularize it as they exploit emerging revenue streams.
The changes I’ve dubbed Revolution 2.1 will have an enormous impact
on Internet and search marketing.
The first thing we SEOs and SEMs need to realize is that the search sector
is expanding rapidly to include specialized, regionalized, and personalized
search tools. Each of the major search engines and literally dozens of smaller
search tools offer a widening array of search options. Learning the new
methods of treating and feeding information to search engines is critical
for continued success in the search marketing field. For instance, we recently
had an opportunity to perform SEO services on a podcast a client in a highly
competitive field wanted to produce. We took a pass on the project as we
felt we didn’t have the skills or tools necessary to do the job. Having
been alerted to a gap in what will be a growing field, we hope to be able
to service such requests in the future. Our survival literally depends on
it.
Next, we need to understand and help our clients understand social and
business communication tools such as RSS feed readers, photo-sharing applications,
and group-networking sites such as Friendster, Tribe.net, MySpace, XuQa and LinkedIn.
Lastly, we need to start adding features such as Yahoo’s MyWeb button
or Google XML sitemaps to client sites to aid in their transition to the
new web being weaved in Revolution 2.1.
The funny thing about revolutions, especially ones that get played out
without a coherent plan that has the full consent of the people, is that
unexpected developments happen. The Internet as we know it today is a prime
example. Back in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, nobody could
have predicted the massive social and economic changes brought about by
the rise of the public Internet.
Flash ahead thirty years to today. Anything can happen and the web that
comes from today’s changes will be far more functional. It will incorporate
traditional media such as TV and newspapers and allow users access to tools
used to create traditional programming. The revolution has been brewing
over the past two years. Ever since a functioning business model based on
paid-advertising turned tiny contextually delivered three-line ads into
pure profit, software designers have been churning out a series of “killer
apps” hoping the suddenly super-wealthy search engines would buy them
or futures-hungry venture capitalists would fund them. For those who were
successful in the development and those of us about to benefit from their
success, the next Internet revolution has begun.
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