The Web – Anyone can do it!

There’s a really great presentation made by a professor from Kansas State University. Watching it will, I think, solidify some really simple but powerful ideas about online culture, if you were having a bit of a time understanding why Web 2.0 is anything but another over-hyped bubble waiting to burst. Watch it. The most salient clip, for me, is a highlighted piece of text based on a Wired magazine article back in August 2005:

“When we post and then tag content, we are teaching the machine. Each time we forge a link, we teach it an idea…100 billion times per day humans click on a web page.”

How can you use your product or idea to influence how content is prioritized and shared? Anyone can create original, meaningful and helpful content based on a company’s particular expertise. If your company creates a natural food product using acai berries, you :
- write health treatises on its benefits in a blog
- post that same content to Wikipedia
- create and share recipes on a recipe website
- post photos of your product on a photo-sharing site.

All of that content, tagged (see previous post on tagging) with your product’s name and a few other meaningful descriptive words, can then enter the web properly indexed, ready to be found and attributed back to you as the generator of that content.

Anyone can do any of this work with a simple internet connection, with the only real cost being the time spent to develop the content and monitor feedback. It’s this ability to actively participate in shaping the internet’s content that is flattening the competitive playing field – it gives individuals and small businesses equal advantage over large companies with large websites, flashy Flash, and intrusive web banner ads. Flattening the playing field is also making for a better quality web world.