You may find the title provocative but it’s a natural follow-up to other headlines of the last few days. In a previous post, it was suggested that the App Internet would seriously weaken Google Search.
Now it would appear that the Web is in a much more hazardous position. This is the Web we all know (as in World Wide Web) although Robert Scoble prefers to call it the ‘common web’ while Chris Saad and Adam Singer call it the ‘Open web’.
In case the title is a little baffling, we’ll go step by step through what it means. Apologies to those who wish to proceed more rapidly. A disruptive technology is defined as follows:
Disruptive technology is a term coined by Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen to describe a new technology that unexpectedly displaces an established technology.
…Christensen demonstrates how it is not unusual for a big corporation to dismiss the value of a disruptive technology because it does not reinforce current company goals, only to be blindsided as the technology matures, gains a larger audience and market share and threatens the status quo.
As you will see, that is a most appropriate explanation for what we are about to discuss.
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Our previous post mentioned our new policy to feature suppliers who have been giving us good service for an extended period of time. Hostgator is the company that has been providing web hosting to the SMM online properties for some years. Their web hosting service is most reliable and we could not be more satisfied with the support we receive whenever we are expanding our activities. Hostgator is featured in the left sidebar with an affiliate link that can at all times give you a 25% discount on whatever web hosting service you might require.
As telecommunications technology advances, it becomes very much easier for a broadband supplier to offer an array of services within a basic package. This is attractive to the supplier, given that the sales package is larger. The customer has the advantage that the total bill will be less than if they bought the services separately.
For those who are following the ongoing SEO testing of the LMNHP approach to blogs, I continue to monitor SERP performances on the four SMM blogs where the LMNHP approach is being adopted. I am constantly amazed by the high rankings that are rapidly achieved by new posts. For critical tests I use Firefox using the Global Search Extension to avoid getting personalized search results. Today I saw a result that was really mind-blowing. Recency of post may play a part in this but it still is noteworthy.
I saw a guest post on the Problogger blog, which clearly has some authority. Its title was Why Professional Writers Need a Blog. Or Not. It suggested that professional writers on nonfiction topics would be well advised to have a blog whereas those writing fiction books would be better served by a static website. I have been looking for high profile blogs where I could see how well a post written using the LMNHP approach would rank against a high profile blog post.
This seemed an ideal subject and was also a topic I wished to discuss since I took issue with the opinions expressed by the author. I firmly believe that professional writers of all types are best served by a blog. As a result I wrote a post, Professional Writers Blog, that was uploaded just over 24 hours ago. The image below is the result when doing a relevant keyword search. This is a 9.0 million item search so there is high competition for this. The result is that shown by Google Australia (clearly far from Canada).
As you will see the blog post I wrote is at #3 while the Problogger post I was commenting on is at #4. Searches on other Google centres using non-personalized search had the two close together, sometimes in this order and sometimes reversed. I still find this hard to believe. Your mileage may vary but if you do a search rapidly for Professional Writers Blog, you may see somewhat similar results.
The LMNHP approach here is behaving exactly as it should. The latest single blog post web page is given as the SERP result with its own Title and with its own meta description. This description was chosen carefully to appeal to potential searchers for these particular keywords. Since this blog post is being shown as the front page of the blog for the time being, this maximizes the number of of back linkis that are registered against this particular URL. Its high ranking in the search engine results is a confirmation of the power of this approach. It is also particularly gratifying that the post outranks the Problogger post, which it was discussing. Recency may play a significant factor in such early results but usually posts will come back to a similar position after taking a dip for a week or two after the initial days of high rankings.
If anyone needed a graphic illustration of the power of the LMNHP approach, this search for Professional Writers Blog provides an outstanding example.
The concept of looking Outside In on almost anything brings to mind a whole series of possible issues. Here are just some:
Outside In has now been suggested as an approach in thinking about customer service in organizations. What counts is how the customer perceives what is being done for them.
It very much relates to the notion of an organization as being customer centric. In other words, this is an organization that focuses on customer needs. Many traditional companies concentrate on producing high quality products and are sometimes described as product-driven. They may not be adequately sensitive to customer needs. The Outside In approach forces the organization to consider the perceptions that customers will have looking from the outside.
This Outside In view also has merit in thinking about websites. Many website owners are proud of the online presence they have created. As they explore what they have created, they may well rightly feel that they have produced a website with a mass of useful information for their prospects and clients. As they look from the inside, the online structure they have developed may well appear most impressive.
Taking the Outside In perspective may produce a different answer. A visitor from the outside only sees the page they land on. With Google searches that may possibly not be the front door: the Home page. They may check out a few other web pages but are never fully aware of the hidden mountain of information that they could explore. If a site map is provided, they can certainly see a long list of what is available but few visitors probably do that.
This different view of the website might appear just a question of different amounts of knowledge, but in fact the Outside In view is a better reflection of what this website notion really involves.
That Outside In view that sees only a series of web pages is in fact reality. The alternative view that in some sense there is a website on the Internet which represents a closely related set of web pages is false. If you do not find that statement sufficiently outrageous, then for simplicity let us say that websites do not exist. A website is just a loose definition of a group of web pages connected by hyperlinks. If you try to make a precise definition of a website, you will find that it does not fit most websites in real life.
Although an owner of an online property may feel a certain group of Web pages constitutes their website, the web pages are quite independent of each other and there is no simple tag or label that indicates which website they belong to. Each web page does contain hyperlinks of course and these may well link with other web pages that are owned by the website owner. The search engines only index web pages and they too have no tag or label that indicates which website any given web page belongs to.
This is not just playing with words. Of course the front end of the URL of a given web page may well be identical with the front end of other related web pages. If so, any hyperlinks between the two web pages can be called internal links. However at no stage of this analysis is a website label attached to each of these web pages.
This is not intended to fuel a philosophical discussion. Rather these distinctions have very important consequences in how the group of web pages should be monitored and managed.
The best big picture view of the Internet is that it is a huge population of web pages which are interlinked via hyperlinks. Any association among a group of web pages is really determined by these hyperlinks. It is not determined by whether or not those web pages exist within the same domain or sub domain.
You may occasionally hear that it is important to get inlinks or backlinks to a website in order to make the website more search engine visible. This should really be interpreted to mean that the particular web pages that are the target of such inlinks will be more search engine visible. It will also give more authority to other web pages they link to. However the authority that passes through these hyperlinks will be the same whether these hyperlinks target closely related web pages or quite independent web pages.
This outside in view of what we call websites highlights the challenge. It is not sufficient just to get a large number of inlinks pointing to the Home page of that fuzzy collection you call your website. This will get a highly diluted amount of authority for all other web pages that are buried deep within the website structure. The best working view is that every web page must create its own visibility through its own inlinks.
This is the difficulty with a traditional website. You add a web page but the only inlinks it has are those created within the website architecture. Special efforts must be made to generate backlinks specifically for any given web page.
This is where a blog becomes so much more powerful. Every new web page (blog post) that is added automatically generates its own inlinks from a variety of sources. Such things as Technorati tags or Deli.cio.us references are one way. To this we can now add social media such as Twitter and Facebook, even though the initial references may have nofollow tags. As human viewers see the references, they may create blog posts themselves that reference (link to) the new web pages. In addition you have the whole slice of the Internet that is set up to handle RSS news feeds with other social media such as FriendFeed to spread the buzz even more.
So forget you have a website. It is sloppy thinking and you will not target your efforts in the best way. Realize that what you have created is a group of web pages. Some of those web pages are much more important than others. Those are the web pages that should be highly visible to the search engines. Plan carefully how you can concentrate your efforts on those ‘money’ pages. You will get much more bang for your buck.
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I must admit my vision of Twitter is very much like that painted by Kelly Forrister who sees it as the Twitter river. She works on David Allen's Getting Things Done Seminars and provides individual Coaching for their clients around the world.
It's an interesting look on how fast the world is moving, or how little our attention spans are willing to absorb, that a quirky little service like Twitter seems to be luring so many of us in. Have you ever been to one of those Lazy Rivers at a resort hotel? The kind where you hop in and out as you please? And around it goes, whether you're in the river or not. That's the best description I've heard of Twitter.
That's largely the way it goes even if you use some service like Tweetdeck to keep things somewhat organized. Of course you have Twitter Search and Hashtags that can allow you to explore just a smaller creek but it is still moving along.
This week I now have a new perspective. If you want to get together with a few friends just to explore something rapidly, then you can use TinyChat, which are Disposable Chatrooms especially for the Twitter Generation
Sometimes all you need is a simple chatroom for real-time text chats. TinyChat solves this problem by creating simple, disposable chatrooms. Tinychats works exactly as advertised. It's a disposable, no-frills chatroom, with a deliberately limited feature set. There are no accounts to sign up for and whenever you open up a new room, TinyChat will simply create a new URL for you.
If you are looking for more permanence, then I highly recommend TweetChat, which gives you access to more permanent chat rooms. In fact they are just showing you the tweets for a certain hashtag, but it is very user-friendly.
To get the idea, you might want to check out Brandchat,which is to be found behind the #brandchat hashtag. This group meets every Wednesday to discuss branding , brand development and customer service. Every Wednesday morning 10 a.m. CST, they tap into their “collective mind” on Twitter and discuss everything branding. Next meeting is April 1st. If you have a question, you can even join their Facebook group. Anything on the Facebook wall gets put on the #brandchat agenda.
If up till now, Twitter has been a raging, tumultuous river, pop into a chatroom and enjoy quietly meeting a few people. Why not try the Google #friendconnect chat room? It always is very quiet there. 
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Barack Obama relied on grassroots leadership to support him in his path to the White House. Not surprisingly he is now re-enlisting volunteers to build support for his bold approach for renewing America’s economy.
Democrats mounted a nationwide effort Saturday to try to harness the grassroots support that helped propel President Obama’s campaign and use it to push for his administration’s initiatives. Volunteers met in 1,200 to 1,300 locations across the country, organizers said — from a library in Arlington, Virginia, to a park in Brooklyn, New York, and to homes and restaurants in California.
In some, participants discussed the president’s agenda. In others, they set out to homes, subway stations and farmers’ markets, asking people to sign forms in which they pledge support for “President Obama’s bold approach for renewing America’s economy” and commit to asking friends, family and neighbors to do the same.
This is the first large-scale effort by the Democratic Party’s new “Organizing for America” initiative to use the network of volunteers to help build and push the administration’s agenda, although in February the group did host house parties where the proposed stimulus bill was discussed. The objective is that organizers can continue growing the vast database of supporters’ e-mail and text addresses, which will include the Obama presidential campaign’s list of supporters.
The success of this type of initiative will greatly depend on the energy and determination of grassroots leaders like Sergio Salmeron, who energize their friends and team-mates to spread the word.
Sergio Salmeron, who started a Washington-area club after the election for supporters of the president’s policies. His effort Saturday afternoon brought together about 16 people, discussing everything from health care reform and whether the president is being inclusive, to foreign policy and whether the administration is on the right track, to the economy. “Obama will need your help to win this fight,” Signer said. Then about half of that group set out to seek signatures at subway stops.
Grassroots leadership works well when hierarchies are downplayed and there is strong mutual respect. Activities like Barack Obama’s appearance on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno this week are clearly signs that the president is reaching out to his fellow citizens.
Grassroots leaders were always powerful forces in their own local settings. What the Internet supports with the increasing popularity of social media is an enormous leverage of the power of their examples.
Democracy is a political system in which the supreme power lies in a body of citizens who can elect people to represent them. Now those same citizens at the grassroots can also make their own impact on how things get done by involving their friends and colleagues.
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The NOW Web is a new term to describe the cyberspace collection of all the information packages that may be currently flying around “online”. Some may assume that must be the same as the Mobile Web. This is not the case.
The Mobile Web is a subset of the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web is all those online properties that are accessible once you know their Universal Resource Identifier (URI). The Mobile Web is that section of WWW.that is accessible if you are using a mobile device. The Mobile Web is thus defined by the hardware used to connect with it. It is concerned with online properties that have a URI.
The World Wide Web itself is a subset of the NOW Web. The NOW Web is intended to signify all those information packages or what might be called Instants that are currently available either via the Internet or perhaps via a telephone circuit or a cell phone wireless connection. It might be an RSS news feed, or a request to get involved in a Google Chat, or even an indication that one of your Facebook friends has come online.
Clearly any Instants that you may be interested in should be accessible to you and ideally you should be made aware of their creation (via alerts) and of their ongoing existence. The NOW Web is therefore defined by the interests of users or consumers. It could be seen as a user-centric defined concept. There are many technical challenges in working with this expanded NOW Web. However this way of picturing the flux of information flow may suggest creative ways of better fulfilling consumers’ needs. This NOW Web way of looking at the online scene was suggested by the way in which Twitter has so grabbed people’s attention and interest.
Footnote: It should be mentioned that this use of the term, NOW Web, is much bigger than that suggested by Vaibhav Domkundwar. The concepts are very much related, but this bigger use may suggest more interesting technical solutions.
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