The More Things Change... - Susan C. Daffron

…the more they remain the same.

I just read an interesting report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The report basically looks at what Web 2.0 really is and if we should care.

They ask:

“As researchers, we instinctively reach for our spreadsheets to see if there is evidence to inform the hype about any online trend.”

Their conclusions seem to mostly be no. For example, the biggest thing most people really do with the Internet is send email (53%). They also compare the concept of Facebook to Geocities circa 1996. Clearly personal pages are not new news. Sheesh, I’m glad it’s not just me that feels like the whole Web 2.0 thing is just a load of hopelessly rehashed hype.

Along the same lines, here’s a response I posted in a discussion list about the hype surrounding blogs. A poster was wondering about starting a blog because “everyone says” a blog improves sales. My reply was…

“Blogs and “article marketing” are just the latest way to do something that should be obvious to writers: establish credibility via the written word.Blogs are search engine friendly and the article marketing sites give you backlinks that direct people to your site. We have been doing that with our own content sites and newsletters for years. We just didn’t call them “blogs.” Any web site that is well done with clean HTML and good content will be found because people will link to it. Blogs often offer other things like automatic pinging that can help search engines find you as well. But a blog is certainly not the be all and end all.

The writing is what’s important. Good content brings visitors from search engines, which in turn brings readers, which you can then turn into customers.”

Granted obviously I do have a blog, but it’s mostly a place to put random musings like this one that I don’t know what else to do with 😉

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