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It's 2007 and it's going to be a great year for the Internet and Web businesses.
First, a little news about this newsletter. We've set up a new website exclusively for The Net Gazette where you can find all the content in this edition, and all subsequent editions, check it out. I truly hope you enjoy reading each one of these installments and that you learn valuable information to help you with your online experience and business. I also want to express my appreciation for continuing to subscribe. Finally, I just completed a new article about a possible future of the Web that you may find interesting and it's hot off the press. It's included here as a bonus at the end. Thanks for being a part of The Net Gazette family.
Web Tip #15:
Begin to consider the Web as the virtual business world that it is where you can set up small online businesses that continue to create money for you even after you stop working on them regularly.
Robert Kiyosaki, author of 'Rich Dad, Poor Dad' and 'The Cash Flow Quadrant', and Michael E. Gerber, author of 'E-Myth' and 'E-Myth Revisited' both suggest that the goal we entrepreneurs should be shooting for is building businesses that eventually run themselves without our further involvement. This way, the money keeps coming in, and we no longer have to work "in" the business.
First, I recommend that you read everything each of these authors has written, and second, I suggest that you embrace and take advantage of the Web for achieving this worthy goal. Read on for one idea to accomplish this.
What is Web 2.0? |
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Question:
After initial setup, what produces both content and revenue without
additional effort?
Answer: Web 2.0 and AdSense.
What is Web 2.0?
Web 2.0 (or Web 2) is the popular term for websites that employ advanced Internet technology and applications including blogs, wikis, RSS and forums. These website have a characteristic that is common to them all, namely user contributed content.
For example, an online forum community can be considered a Web 2.0 website. That is, a forum's content is created by its users. The website grows without any additional effort from the website owner after initial design and setup.
This is one reason why blogs have become so popular. Popular blogs allow readers to add their own comments, thus growing the blog. Search engines love new and fresh content, but creating original content is time-consuming and often time challenging. So why not have your website visitors create it for you?
Keep in mind however that only a tiny fraction of blogs have a regular readership that routinely contributes. In an effort to present both sides of the Web story, here's a blog entry I found recently:
Why the Blog is Dead
I am not sure if blogging was really ever 'alive' come to think of it. Blogs are barely read by anyone at all.
I'm just another dumb ass blogger who tries to make regular entries in this blog. So I don't have any special knowledge about blogging in general. But I started wondering if anyone ever reads this blog, and then I dug a little deeper.
I mean, I rarely, if ever, get someone leaving comments here. Does anyone read this? Hello? Is there anybody out there?!
I decided to look at some stats on blogging. Here's what I found:
Gallup Poll Article Blog Stats:
About 75% of people in the US use the Internet ... just 12% of people read blogs at all ... and 56% of consumers don't appear to know what they are. Most of the results are regarding political blogs."
Ok, so only 12% of the people online even read blogs, and you can bet that they're all probably reading the same popular blogs and ignoring the rest of us poor shlubs completely!
Here's some more statistics that are a little more comforting:
About 100,000 new weblogs were created each day and the blogosphere (the entire interconnected web of blogs) is doubling in size approximately every 230 days.But if you think about it, if 100,000 new blogs are created each day, that's diluting the potential readership even more. Now our blog has to compete with 100K more today, and tomorrow another 100K, and the next day, and . . .
Here's some more info I found:
Several studies indicate that most blogs are abandoned soon after creation and that few are regularly updated.
"The 'average blog' thus has the lifespan of a fruitfly. One cruel reader of this page commented that the average blog also has the intelligence of a fly.
The Perseus report noted above indicates that 66.0% of surveyed blogs had not been updated in two months, "representing 2.72 million blogs that have been either permanently or temporarily abandoned".
So, if you think creating a blog is going to make you famous, or if you think it's going to propel your business into 21st Century profits, you might as well consider blogging dead.
I suspect that there is still a mystery out there about blogs that perpetuates the blogosphere's growth. It's new, it's different, everyone's doing it. So people type away, adding blog entry after entry, really getting into their narcissism and crafting each sentence to seem important, interesting, intelligent, relevant.
And I guess I am going to do just the same. Maybe someday, some lone soul will happen upon this drivel and mildly like it.
So, should you make a blog? Yes. The only way you'll find out is to create one and work at it for a while yourself. Believe me, there are many bloggers who would disagree with the opinion above, and that's because they have done it right and have a large and engaged readership. The blogosphere has undeniably affected recent politics. And since search engines love blogs, attaching a blog to your business website can help rankings. Engines love blogs because they're updated often, and engines eat up fresh content. If you create a blog, be sure to do two things: update it often, and keep at it, even if you get no feedback or comments. Consider it your business diary that others can read, nothing more. Eventually, you will notice tangible benefits.
But maybe a forum website would be better for your industry. A forum creates a place where like-minded people can congregate. Although it opens up your business to public criticism, a forum can be great for a business website. It's a place where your customers can answer questions about your products. It's a place where you can announce new company initiatives and explain the benefits of new products or services. It's a place where you can discover many things about how good or bad you're doing in your marketplace. A forum allows for easy customer feedback. Warning: if you create a forum, you must have thick skin, since you can expect lots of criticism.
A wiki is best understood by simply going to wikipedia.com, the largest and most popular wiki on the Net. This is a website that grows by members who contribute to the articles. Anyone can contribute. And over time, the site grows because of a vast collaboration. A wiki is just one more way visitors can contribute to your content and help you grow your website.
If I can utilize others to help grow my website, whether it's a wiki, forum, blog, or any other Web 2.0 technology, then I'm happy to oblige.
Also, check
out this month's edition of Entrepreneur
Magazine for a good synopsis of Web 2.0.
Google AdSense |
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Whether it's a blog, forum, or wiki, the content grows and grows over time. If you add advertisements to these interactive websites, you can monetize them. Fortunately, Google has made it extremely easy to do this. It's called AdSense.
Many books have been written about AdSense, and if you are at all interested in this, I recommend reading the book The AdSense Code: What Google Never Told You About Making Money with AdSense by Joel Comm.
Google's website says: Google AdSense is a fast and easy way for website publishers of all sizes to display relevant Google ads on their website's content pages and earn money. Because the ads are related to what your visitors are looking for on your site — or matched to the characteristics and interests of the visitors your content attracts — you'll finally have a way to both monetize and enhance your content pages. Go to http://www.google.com/adsense to learn more and sign up.
You make money when site visitors are on your website and click on the ads generated by AdSense. In fact, people don't even need to click on them. After a certain number of people have viewed a page on your site that has AdSense, you make money. Often times we're just talking pennies, but it adds up.
You've probably seen Google AdSense in action many times while on the Web. See http://www.google.com/adsense/adformats for examples.
Getting back to the original questions posed at the beginning: After the work it takes to create and setup a new website, what produces both content and revenue without any additional effort?
The answer is websites that have AdSense on them and that allow users to contribute their own original content. If your website is unique, engaging, relevant and search engine friendly, you will make money, and not have to do any more work. Imagine if you earned $.05 every time someone viewed and clicked on a new forum entry AdSense advertisement? Now image if your forum website had 100 pages? Further imagine if you had 10 forums doing this simultaneously each and every day. You get the idea. There's gold in them thar hills!
Of course people
will have to be able to find your site and that's where search engine
optimization comes in. Read earlier Net Gazettes for information
on SEO (and keep a look out for future editions).
Search Engine Optimization – Internal Linking |
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For search engine optimization, links are the silver bullet. The more links pointing back to your website from other sites, the higher your site will rank for any given term with all other things being equal. What many people don't realize is that even the links within your site count towards ranking.
For example, if site A and site B have 2 links each pointing back at them from site C, but site A has 100 pages with a link on every page pointing back to the homepage, and site B has 10 pages with a link on every page pointing back to the homepage, and everything else is equal, site A's homepage will rank higher because it has more internal links pointing back to its homepage.
This is why sites with a massive amount of pages often rank well, even if they haven't bothered to practice on-page optimization. It's hard to imagine, but there are sites that have hundreds of thousands of unique pages.
You may be wondering at this point how it is physically possible to create that many HTML pages. Hint: Web 2.0 sites accomplish this by allowing and encouraging site visitors to contribute to the content.
Your internal site linking structure is therefore very important. Every page on your website needs to have a text links on it. Search engines do not follow links in JavaScript or images, so text links are paramount. Furthermore, all your internal links need to be descriptive. The keywords you want to rank well for need to be in the text of the links.
If you sell blue widgets, then every page on your site needs to have a text hyperlink that points back to your homepage with the words 'blue widgets' in it. Most sites have a text link on every page that says 'Home'. This is no good unless you want to rank well for the term 'home'.
If you look, you'll notice that many sites have text links at the bottom of every page, especially if the site uses buttons and/or JavaScript for its main navigation. The links at the bottom are for the search engines. And it's a good idea anyway since some people browse with JavaScript and images turned off. See our website, www.oakwebworks.com, and view any page's footer for an example.
Bonus Article - The Future of the WebAn original article about a possible, and maybe probable, future for the Web. |
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The Web of Tomorrow
A man switches on a tiny wireless chip that has been surgically implanted behind his ear, which then synchs up with the Web wherever he is in the world. The mere thought of logging in to the Internet triggers the system to turn on and connect to the Web. He could be on a bus or at the beach and from all outward appearances he is just staring off into space. But he sees a three dimensional artificial world before him that he can manipulate any way he chooses by thought alone.
By looking at the trends of today we can begin to develop a picture of what the Web of tomorrow will look like. I believe the Web will improve and grow in a way that will dwarf its present existence and will improve and enrich everyone’s lives way beyond what we can imagine today. The Internet will become as integrated into everyone’s everyday lives as much as, and even more so, than the television or phone (in developed nations first, then everywhere). Television, communications and the Internet will merge.
The Web will become increasingly interactive, realistic, three dimensional, and virtual. Two dimensional displays will evolve into three dimensional displays. And the Net will probably incorporate more than the two senses of seeing and hearing. It will first be integrated into all other electronics such as household appliances, automobiles, and anything else with a microchip. Then it will be integrated directly into our brains.
I also envisage this new Web creating an unimaginably sophisticated data sphere that surrounds and envelops the world like a warm electronic blanket, connecting everyone and everything. And it may some day become an autonomous and sentient entity in its own right that we come to depend on for life itself.
When a person switches on his wireless Web chip and connects with the Net, he'll be looking at and interacting with the Web of the future. He'll manipulate objects, click on links, download information, and communicate with anyone by simply thinking it. In fact, when he navigates to a retail store to buy products, for instance, he'll be able to “pick them up” and “feel” the products he wants to buy merely by thinking the appropriate thoughts.
In the future, Web-based software agents will constantly build dynamic lists and instructions to help people in personal and professional activities. These software agents are subroutines, or small programs, which may be part of a responsive Internet Operating System that serves humanity, or destroys it. Programs may become responsible for doing some of the basic thinking that we get stuck routinely doing today. Furthermore, it may be responsible for storing some of our memories as well.
The Web has already become something we rely on for memory, and that reliance will only grow. We'd rather look something up on a search engine two or three times instead of trying to remember it. Eventually, we'll come to rely on the Web for memories and immediate information so that it will seem like we are missing a part of our own brain when not "jacked in" to the Net, to borrow a phrase from science fiction writer William Gibson. The Net will be such a part of our existence that we may even feel profound separation and isolation when not connected.
The Evolution in the Way in Which We View the Web
Of course we're not going to jump from flat screen LCD monitors of today to displays that exist only "in our minds". Three dimensional displays may be the bridge. There is a device in existence today called a Heliodisplay™ that produces holograms which actually exist in three dimensions and are created with photographic projection using laser technology. It's possible that all displays will employ this technology. The gaming industry ceaselessly works at making artificial experiences more realistic and is a powerful driving force in computer display technology.
The Web of our future will first be truly device independent where each piece of equipment is a different window that peers into the same global Web. From handheld devices not unlike the Star Trek Communicators, to cell phones, automobile dashboards, embedded refrigerator displays and MP3 players, all will be portals into the same World Wide Web.
And of course everything will be connected. Instead of applications running on individual personal computers and devices, applications will operate on the Net and be accessible to anyone, creating a loose Internet Operating System.
Ultimately, the Web of our future will most likely abandon standard two dimensional and even three dimensional displays and instead be projected right onto our corneas, skipping the middle man, so to speak.
FutureWeb is Closer Than We Think
Already demonstrated in the lab is the ability to cause a computer to react to thought alone. Duke University neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis works in the field of BMI (brain-machine interface). In an experiment involving a monkey, a computer and a monitor, Nicolelis and his team successfully caused the monkey to communicate with and control a robotic arm through its brain’s neural signals alone.
The monkey’s brain activity and signals were first monitored with numerous electrodes inside its scalp while it manipulated a joystick. The scientists taught the monkey to move the joystick with its arms to accomplish movement on the monitor. The scientists then took the joystick away, but continued everything else the same way. Since the monkey’s brain was hooked up to the computer, each time it had the thought of moving its arms, the desired affect actually happened anyway on the monitor, triggered by the monkey's thoughts alone. In fact, the monkey was even able to control an artificial arm over the Internet 600 miles away in the same manner.
There are two important applications for this technology that are driving its research: medicine and war, two constants in all of human history. Doctors will someday be able to attach a prosthetic arm to a patient, wire it up to her brain, and succeed in enabling her to control the prosthetic fingers by simply thinking it.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) manages the research for the U.S. Department of Defense. In 2003, DARPA invested $23 million in BMI programs, including the one at Duke University cited above. Their goal is to allow soldiers to control weapons of all kinds by thought only. These super soldiers will be able to stealthily navigate through a battlefield willing robotic gliders above to drop their payloads of smart bombs on the enemy over the next hill, without endangering their own lives.
Ethical questions aside, brain-machine interfacing will someday mature and become integrated with our lives. Since the Web is already such a part of our world, the marriage of the two is inevitable.
This technology can be utilized in the other direction as well. Just like a thought can produce computer behavior, the computer will someday be able to send back sensory data other than just sight and sound. If a computer is hooked directly up to the brain, then smell, taste and touch can be affected as well. The Web will literally come to life.
The Semantic Web and the Contributions of Everyone
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, wrote a book called 'Weaving the Web'. Among the many profound ideas expressed are two concepts relevant here. One is the Semantic Web, which is explained as “The Web of data with meaning in the sense that a computer program can learn enough about what the data means to process it.” Metadata is the term used for data about data. Most Web pages today have embedded in the html code metadata that gives information about the Web page. Eventually, this information will become much more robust, allowing more intelligent searches to become a reality.
The Semantic Web, or something similar, may have the potential to help make the Internet an entity in its own right. Parallel processing, the connecting of computers to make super computers, has been in existence for some time now. In fact, that is how the human brain operates, by conducting many operations at the same time.
The other fascinating idea Berners-Lee expressed in this landmark book is that his original idea for the Web involved much more of a two-way exchange of information. His original vision for the Web was one of collaboration. He wanted people to be able to post information to the Web as easily as it was to view information. Unfortunately, the latter has been embraced more readily by the general population.
But now we see the emergence of "Web 2.0", a fairly new term that describes an innovative type of website that is built on the participation of its users. Today we are finally achieving what Berners-Lee had in mind all along. With websites such as MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Squidoo, and Digg, non-technical users can now post information and contribute to the Web as easily as they can access it. The Web of the future will embrace this concept even more, causing its speed of growth to eclipse today's rate.
It is not hard to see that the Web could be a vast parallel processing farm, that given enough artificial intelligence programming, the infusion of Semantic Web systems, and the constant additions from billions of intelligent beings (namely humans), it could have the potential of becoming something of a unified intelligence, a data sphere that surrounds the planet and is more powerful that the sum of its parts.
This concept of technology's exponential growth turning onto something we cannot even imagine with the possibility of the Internet becoming sentient is not new. Vernor Vinge, a retired Professor of Mathematics at San Diego State University, a computer scientist and a science fiction author, wrote about the Singularity in a 1993 essay.
A superintelligence emerging out of the Web was also written about by Kevin Kelly in Wired Magazine in August 2005 and also published on KurzweilAI.com.
". . . we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence.
This planet-sized computer is comparable in complexity to a human brain. Both the brain and the Web have hundreds of billions of neurons (or Web pages). Each biological neuron sprouts synaptic links to thousands of other neurons, while each Web page branches into dozens of hyperlinks. That adds up to a trillion "synapses" between the static pages on the Web. The human brain has about 100 times that number—but brains are not doubling in size every few years. The Machine [the Web of the future] is."
A quick online search will yield many examples of bizarre concepts that existed only in science fiction later becoming reality. The Web is something that Earth has never seen before. It not only has the potential to connect everyone, but it can also extend every brain and grow exponentially. It may take a lot longer than anyone thinks right now, but eventually the Web of the future will be vastly different and more powerful than we can possibly imagine today.
By Jason OConnor,
President Oak Web Works, LLC
Copyright 2007
Till next time, Happy Webbing
- Jason
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