Web 2.0 Blog

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…

Although syndication is most notably recalled for its powerful impact on the success of blogging technologies during the web 2.0 boom, it’s ability to inform users of new content on otherwise stand-alone sites is what is giving supporting sites a significant advantage. A content management system is useless if users are unaware that new content has been added, and often users won’t go looking for the information you’ve added. In my opinion, the days of static websites with non-interactive content are numbered.

Web 2.0 is changing the way websites are being created. A website I created recently called Mystical Art, was developed completely using blogging technologies, however it assumes the appearance of a normal website. Further styling of the sidebar of this site would make it indistinguishable from a traditionally built website. In addition to this it has an RSS feed so that potential users can stay automatically updated every time a new piece of art is added.

This shows that even non-blogs should be syndicating their content. Newspapers in the real world are published daily with new content. In order for this to be realized in web technology, they have made their corresponding websites rich with RSS feeds of the latest headlines. For example, check out The Independent or The Times. In most cases, the feeds can be published elsewhere meaning users needn’t even visit the company’s website. All top web browsers and next-gen operating systems are driving support for RSS, meaning it’s even easier for users to subscribe to feeds.

I fully expect RSS or a similar content delivery platform to become a standard feature of websites in the future as users become more accustomed to syndication feeds. But how soon will it happen, or will another technology be developed that can perform better functionality than RSS?