Web 2.0 Blog

Having been a user of Sphinn for quite a long time now, a site which I find very useful and I respect greatly for the general quality of news items posted there by its users, I’m becoming concerned about the volume of companies who think they can get themselves links from this site and actually think their mindless spam is worthwhile.

Sphinn is an INTERNET MARKETING news and discussions site which encapsulates many corners of web activity. It is NOT a resource for promoting car insurance deals, free gym equipment or information about gluten-free pizzas. Those thinking about organising an SEO strategy in this way should know that these types of links are usually deleted within a couple of hours after only several users report it as spam. Furthermore, the link is only influential for as long as the page is relevant which in most circumstances is not very long - so even if you avoid removal from the site, neither your traffic nor your page rank will increase.

I’d also make the same recommendation for StumpleUpon, but I’m not as familiar with this site. Ultimately I think social bookmarking is a very important factor in the sharing of information over the Internet and a great outlet for bringing traffic to your site - especially in circumstances where the content is fantastic, but the author, having no idea about SEO, will never get any readers. But we must be careful that the system isn’t taken advantage of. Spamming social bookmarking sites isn’t blackhat, but it is unethical and worthless - people will never learn. Someone once said SEO is a mug’s game. Sadly, I guess social bookmarking is only advocating that theory.

I came across Profy today and it really impressed me. It claims to be an ‘all-in-one’ blogging platform, a haven for bloggers if you like, where a combination of blog posting, social networking and feed reading is combined into one easy-to-use platform. Having watched the demo, it certainly does look easy to use and this leads on from my previous post about who uses social bookmarking. My concerns of casual Internet users being able to use such features were founded on lack of purpose to uses them and lack of mass documentation describing what they are and how to use them.

The platform consists of four main areas:

• Simple blogging platform where you can choose from a variety of templates, modify the layout and add HTML/JavaScript
• Social bookmarking and sharing tags and favourites amongst other bloggers in the community
• A place for social networking - interacting with other user’s profiles including discussion boards and instant messaging
• An RSS feed reader platform which storing any number of RSS feeds from external sites

Profy Dashboard

Ultimately, this is another example of a nice piece of user-friendly Web 2.0 software which can get pretty much anyone involved with social networking, blogging and sharing, all in one place. But how will people know about it, and will it ever have the power and publicity to overthrow giants like Blogger and Facebook. I wouldn’t be so confident. But as a Web 2.0 startup, it shows promising signs for a potentially large userbase and with the right promotion it could introduce these terrific Web 2.0 technologies to a generation of casual users.

You look at any blog post including this one, and you’ll see various tags attached around the pages tell you to ‘bookmark this’, ’sphinn that’ or ‘make this post a favourite’ and I’m sitting here thinking who actually uses all these widgets and why? Digg claims to have over 20 million users, which is quite incredible but who are these users?

The idea is that when you bookmark a site or a post, it becomes saved in your profile on the social bookmarking site and most likely shared to other users using the same service. So by making this bookmark, you are also alerting others to the existance of this website’s content. But is it meant for casual Internet users? I think not.

From the people I have asked, who are regular users of social networing sites and are therefore quite in tune with web 2.0 technologies, there is not much understanding of what a social boomark is. Ther’s not much out there that will tell usrs what it social bookmarking is. No adverts, no formal descriptions and certainly no advice as to why anyone should bother with it. And yet there’s millions of users using these services worldwide, how did it all take off?

I do know that social bookmarking is quickly becoming an ideal resource for search engine optimizers. Every time my posts are submitted to social boomarking sites I get more backwards links and Google sees these links as valuable votes, a process which will increase my rankings. If my readers also submit my posts to social bookmarking sites then that helps me even more. It’s therefore easy to see why webmasters use social bookmarking.

However a drawback of this is that these systems are becoming abused by spammers who want nothing more than to fill these sites up with their links. A lot of sites are now using nofollow tags to combat this.

So it’s a good information resource, a way of sharing and promoting websites and it’s definitely a notable method for optimizing RSS based websites, but I’m still not sure who the majority of their users are. It’s also very difficult to find any information about who the users are, I certainly couldn’t find any information on Google regarding the market of this phenomenon. There’s millions of users out there who are using these sites and my guess would be that the majority of users are keen Internet users who embrace web 2.0 technologies and have more than a passing interest in Internet services. This would include:

• Web developers
• Forum and blog posters
• Internet marketers
• Web writers
• Graphic designers
• Web enthusiasts

I simply cannot see how casual users would have the interest, time and patience to learn about how to use social bookmarking. But maybe I am wrong. If you can shed any light on this please give me a reply, or even add this post to a social bookmarking site. Sphinn it, Furl it, StumbleUpon it or and tell people that you’ve Reddit. Just don’t ask them understand it…