Web 2.0 is made for the little guy.

Web 2.0 is made for the little guy. I've been slow to appreciate the importance of Web 2.0 in internet marketing. Especially for the smaller guy.
But now that I'm finally starting to "get it", I'm bursting to pass it along!

The traditional WorldWideWeb has been search engine dominated. Despite the power of Google and similar browsers, it is still difficult, frustrating and wery time consuming to assemble an informed opinion on any major topic of interest.

Secondly, the search engine higher rankings are dominated by big outfits with the resources to develop and optimize the information content of their sites. The little guy is progressively being squeezed out of the first 3 pages of search results (folks rarely go behond page 3). Similarly, Pay Per Click advertising is being progressively priced out of reach.

So the stage is open for a new human driven and human scale approach to organising information called "social networking" or Web 2.0.

Specialist sites like Squidoo, My Space, Technorati etc. allow groups of private individuals to contribute their two cents worth on every topic under the sun - either directly or by cross referencing to their own articles, blogs and websites. The Web 2.0 host sites then do a great job of indexing and correlating the resulting info with search labels called "tags".

When these data sites are mined with a query to get the dope on, say, "expresso machines" or "generating web traffic" - you are steered to discussion and documention threads that discuss the topic, in detail, and from many points of view.

The information result is like capturing a cross section of all the blog articles on earth to see what they say globally about the queried topic. Through posts and link exchanges in Web 2.0, even very small players can raise their visibility greatly.

Some very savvy, informed folks are counselling that Web 2.0 will be the phenomenon of 2007. Additonally, we should also factor in the development of RSS feeds (text) and podcasting (the audio equivalent of RSS).

You are advised to do some quick research on Web 2.0 and RSS very soon. These new technologies are already being packaged cleverly to be accessible and easy to use.

Most importantly, they can drive mucho new traffic to your site - quickly, easily and very cheaply compared with the classic alternatives.

Steve Henderson