Friday, May 25, 2007

What The Heck Is Web 2.0

When I first saw a banner ad in one of my favorite traffic exchange yesterday, I thought someone was trying to sell me another worthless piece of software ya know? like the Internet Explorer 6.0 or something like that, then the more I visited forums, blogs, myspace and other websites pertaining to online marketing, I realized that it was something new and big.

The way they are talking about it these days seems like the world is coming to an end or something but the buzz surrounding the Web 2.0 is making alot of people excited.

So what the heck is We 2.0 or what does it mean?

Well, according to Tech Encyclopedia, it means an umbrella term for the second wave of the World Wide Web. Sometimes called the "New Internet," Web 2.0 is not a specific technology; rather, it implies two paradigm shifts. The one most often touted is "user-generated content," like Youtube.com and the second is "thin client computing".

Don't ask me about the second one, it gives me a migrane just reading it and trying to understand it at the same time. I think it has to do with data and applications are stored on Web servers, and a user has access from any computer via a Web browser, I guess it's sort of like Itune and Napster where people can download stuff and put it on their Ipod or something like that.

Ok fair enough, so if the new wave of the internet is called Web 2.0, what was Web 1.0 or was there even a Web 1.9?

Where the heck have I been in the last 5 years? my goodness!

Below is a comparison between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 just to give you a perspective.

Web 1.0
Web 2.0
DoubleClick --> Google AdSense
Ofoto --> Flickr
Akamai --> BitTorrent
mp3.com --> Napster
Britannica Online --> Wikipedia
personal websites --> blogging
evite --> upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation --> search engine optimization
page views --> cost per click
screen scraping --> web services
publishing --> participation
content management systems --> wikis
directories (taxonomy) --> tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness --> syndication

What does this mean to you and me and to the rest of the budget challenged- internet marketing newbies out there? We need to pay attention if we want to stay informed or stay ahead of the competition.

That's why I bought an e-book yesterday about Squidoo: How to build a massive list using a 100% free advertising tool. First of all the word ' Squidoo' is not a type of calamari dish you eat in a restaurant or some slimy animal that swims in the ocean, even though the similary is uncanny. It's an invention by some guy name Seth Godin (an internet guru) where you can create a 'lense' or a website of anything that you are an expert in. Basically it's a new platform that falls under the Web 2.0 umbrella.

Why is Squidoo so popular these days? it's because it is Google friendy, it can bring you hoards of traffic to your website, you can grab lots of subscribers and apparantly you can make some money too, so I've heard. We will see about that.

Anyway....
This is how powerful Squidoo is: if you Google the search term ' psp download', you'll notice the 4th line down is a squidoo page. Can you imagine how much traffic that site gets? Wow !that's pretty impressive considering Squidoo is free, furthermore that site I believe is on the top 100 in Squidoo.com in terms of traffic volume . I'm not sure if I can achieve that level of success but hey, I will die trying.

Anyway it's getting late, almost 1:00 in the morning and have to work tomorrow but I will post a link to the e-book this week so anyone can download it.

Take care.

Paul

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