Five Things Web 2.0 Has Changed in Five Years

The internet has changed a lot over the past few years, thanks mostly to the influence of Web 2.0 and the powerful tools it allows developers to utilize for their services. Here are five of the most affected aspects of the internet since then.
It’s no secret that the internet has evolved in the last five years. After the seemingly devastating crash of the late 90s, everyone assumed the internet was done for. Unfortunately, the market has a habit of overreacting and assuming the worst from short term failures. If one looks at the sites and services that ultimately failed, it was less a matter of implosion and more a matter of not having a proper market. The internet sprung up fast and everyone was so excited that every minute idea was given a massive pay day by the public. Eventually, when everyone realized that not every idea with Dot Com attached to the end of it would make money, the boom crashed.

But, the technology finally evolved and with it a burgeoning market for internet commerce, mostly in advertising. It took a while, but when a larger percentage of world citizens gained broadband internet access and millions started logging in every day to check email, news and the newest ping pong ball video on YouTube, everything sorted itself out and the internet started to make real money.

Today, Web 2.0 describes any technology that allows users to directly interact and change the content of a web page or service. This includes anything such as blogs, social networks or digital forums such as YouTube or Flickr. These sites make vast sums of money for dozens of companies.

And eventually, that money making caught the eye of the major industry and cultural players in America and now things have developed to the point of doing things it never did before. These five innovations are not just interesting new technologies, but changes to the way we see our lives on a daily basis:

News and Politics

News and politics have recently undergone their fair share of massive changes, largely in part due to the fact that news media has been making that steady shift for the past few years. Since the New York Times made the online jump a decade ago, everyone else has slowly been moving resources to the internet. However, with Web 2.0, the internet has become a central hub for the dissemination of news to the masses. Blogging changed how politicians interacted with their constituents and news is now presented in real time through a hundred different resources. Anyone with a computer can now learn about the goings on of a half a world a way and watch their local senator’s newest campaign message all in the same few minutes.

Telecommunications

The changes to the phone industry have been underway since VoIP first showed up a few years ago. This massive change to the landscape of telecommunications is a major change in the circuit board based industry. Digital phone calls are cheaper, easier and more customizable than traditional calls and with Web 2.0 technology more and more companies are hopping on board and offering services to enhance that experience. For example, VoIP users can now set up a switchboard from their computer to direct where calls are sent through services like Grand Central or send messaged directly through their friends’ blogs or social network profiles with the click of a mouse and cheap microphone.

Entertainment

Entertainment has long since been the cutting edge of new technology and while the major companies are actually starting to fall behind a little bit, the user generated entertainment industry has exploded in recent years, creating mega-sites like YouTube. Videos of ping pong ball tricks and skateboarding dogs are not the only changes in the industry though. Musicians now create their own home videos and utilize the internet to spread their music virally. Film companies create ad campaigns with which to spread their wares and television is now easily accessible from network websites and video gathering pages. Entertainment, as well as gaming has become as easily accessible as ever and continues to grow as the studios and networks that held out until now realize that this is the future of their industries.

Socialization

The most obvious change to the landscape thanks to Web 2.0 technologies is the growth of social networking and the interaction methods people use. With almost 200 million users on MySpace alone and millions more on Facebook, Orkut, Hi5 and Xanga, there are millions of users around the world tapping into the growing technologies presented in socializing online. This includes everything from blogging about one’s day to uploading personal profiles and comments or saving a dozen albums of photographs to the internet for friends and family to peruse.

Education

Education is probably the last place anyone might expect to find growth considering the time-wasting image that the internet exudes. However, for those in school or in the teaching industry however, the usefulness of blogging, forum posting and interactive websites is incredibly high. For a long time now, professors have been posting their syllabi and class notes on the internet and offering students a space to interact and discuss that class work. Now though, as more classes are growing used to the fact that a majority of research is done on the internet and students interact online more than ever, classes are moving to digital workspaces and teachers are creating blogs on which comments are required as part of a daily grade. The freedom and constant interaction that the internet provides for teachers and students means that future educators will surely utilize it to its fullest extent.

Other Mediums

The usefulness of something like Web 2.0 has made almost every industry rethink how they interact with the world. Businesses use blogs to keep their clients and employees updated rather than using memos; communications have changed to the point of being almost entirely digital, and eventually even more aspects of daily interaction will change due to the ability to create and edit content dynamically from anywhere in the world. It’s just a matter of the proper innovation and creativity to make it happen.
Article By Anthony Chatfield

Do Article Directories Still Rock In A Web 2.0 World?

The rapid rise of Web 2.0 and social media sites simply begs the question: Are Article Directories Relevant Anymore?

Just to be a spoilsport and ruin all the suspense and fun, I am going to answer the question posed by the headline right here. The answer is a resounding yes! And to preempt any whining and grumbles about how I ruined the surprise (at least I did warn you) here are the reasons why I killed said suspense:

1) This ain't no thriller!

2) People's online reading habits are generally limited to scanning. I couldn't take the chance that the puppet masters responsible for tugging at the article directory strings would take one glance at the header alone, scream a stream of invectives before simmering down to take the decisive and irreversible position of forever banning me from their directories!

Okay, now that's out of the way, let's get back to the issue of categorically proving why article directories are still very relevant in a Web 2.0 world? After all surely you weren't going to just take my word for it...Come off it! This is the internet. Who can you possibly trust without proof huh?

Most Article Directories Are Already Web 2.0 Ready

The vast majority of article directories are in fact already Web 2.0 optimized and ready. This is quite obvious by the array of social media promotional buttons and comment templates usually found at the bottom of any article. In any case article directories are already mobile platform based and support dynamic website script language such as php.

Article Directories Are Quickly Indexed

Listen up if you have a newborn blog or website, because this aspect is of grave importance to the well being of that neonate website of yours. Article directories are updated massively and on a regular basis which means that they are quickly indexed and continuously crawled by the search engines. In other words, if you are desperately seeking to get your website/blog incorporated into the search engines index , posting a well written article of yours to a well established directory will very nicely cover that particular hurdle.

Driving Web Traffic To Your Website

Ah yes. This happens to be one of the strongest arguments for social media website proponents. Be that as it may, writing and posting articles to the various article directories strewn across the web is an excellent way to get your new site noticed and more importantly to get interested visitors to look over your website (note that website and blog are being interpreted as the same thing here, and the words are interchangeable). Although Web 2.0 aficionados claim that they can attain far greater quantities of web traffic to their sites, what they aren't so keen on publicizing is the quality of that traffic with respect to conversion; i.e., how good is that Web 2.0 traffic really as far as executing your most desired objective is concerned?

Another aspect that isn't much touted is the fact that it actually takes a considerable amount of effort to promote one's article on a social media website to the point where it gets sufficient exposure to generate massive amounts of traffic. Such promotional work largely involves getting social media "friends" to vote for your article. In fact until fairly recently when various Web 2.0 hubs wizened up, some social media practitioners had perfected their web 2.0 promotional skills to the point that invariably their articles were appearing at the top of social media websites such as Digg. This they managed by gaming the system, but as one such disgruntled practitioner put it, "Digg Has Smartened Up!"

Article Directory Traffic vs. Web 2.0 Traffic.

As briefly mentioned in the immediately preceding paragraph, social media web traffic does not translate well into financial profit. The one saving grace is if you can get huge volumes of traffic to your site only then might you see any significant monetary gain! Oh and if by chance your blog or website happens to be about making money, forget it, you are automatically fighting 2 uphill battles; social media websites hate marketers! In such a scenario, not only will you find it rather difficult to draw substantial numbers of visitors to your site, you'll be lucky if you survive half a year without being ignominiously booted out of the various Web 2.0 sites for "unabashed self-promotion!"

However, even if your blog isn't about how to make money (thus naturally money-making tips won't be the substance of your posts on Web 2.0 websites), traffic from those social media websites will still have a low conversion rate. Most visitors from Web2.0 sites are what I term Curiosity Prospects...

They stumbled upon your link bait header, were intrigued, decided to check it out, traipsed over to your site, saw, scanned then scrammed all within seconds!

If you use web traffic analytic software on your site you'll readily notice that people from social media websites spend seconds on your blog and rarely if ever bother to check out any other pages! This is in stark contrast to traffic that originates from article directories. Certainly you may not get as much traffic from article hosting websites but the simple truth is that the traffic you do get from them is much more targeted and ultimately valuable to your business.

Visitors from article directories spend much more time on your website and are much more likely to review other pages rather than just the homepage. On the face of it this actually makes a lot of sense; a person who visits your site via the link on an article you wrote is really really interested in what more you have to say which explains why they read said article in its entirety! That person has a far higher likelihood of spending time on your site reading your content than an incidental Curiosity Prospect who got there because of an intriguing headline!

Click Link Below To Learn The Surprising Truth About Web 2.0 Linklove

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