web 2.0

This post forms part of a series. Read the first installment.

Words: Pete Ashton
Illustration: Raymond Weekes

Now let’s say that you’re actually really boring. There’s a market for what you do but to be honest the mechanisms of how you do it aren’t really of interest to anyone. Or let’s say you just don’t want to communicate all this fluffy personal nonsense. Blogging as I’ve described it here just doesn’t interest you in the slightest. Allowing for the fact that you probably haven’t read this far (which, if you’ll forgive me, demonstrates a limitation of the magazine form - online this “post” would stand alone and those for whom it might be relevant would find it through Google regardless of what came before or after it on the blog itself) the blogging form still has value to you.

You’ve probably heard the term Web 2.0. If you’ve investigated it a bit you might think it has to do with something called User Generated Content and heralds a revolution whereby professionals are overthrown in favour of the amateur masses, or somesuch nonsense. While this is a side-effect of the blogging revolution it’s not what’s really important about it. What’s really interesting is that the internet is starting to be populated by data that is structured and interchangeable according to established standards.

To illustrate what this means think of a library full of books. Every book is different with unique content but there are aspects of the books that fit into categories. The title, author, publisher, Dewy Decimal categories, dimensions, ISBN, and so on. This information can be indexed by the library to not only identify what shelf the book is held on but how it relates to other books in the collection, very handy for books that cover a number of different subjects.

Most blogging services, along with services like Flickr and YouTube, structure the information you put into them in a similar way. So a blog post has at the very least a title, date, category, and the content itself. And because this is based on accepted standards all this information is interchangeable. Which means anyone can take your content and stick it into a giant database automatically. And then people can ask this database questions and find relevant and accurate information which may well include your content.

You might hear people talking about arcane and mysterious arts like Search Engine Optimisation but this is pretty much all there is to it. Put your stuff online in a manner in which Google can understand it and you’ll appear in the relevant search results. If you have photos on Flickr that are accurately tagged in relation to their subject then they’ll appear in the searches for those subjects.

You don’t have to run a “blog” in the accepted sense of the word in order to get into this game. It’s just that blogs automatically structure themselves in this way and since they’re very easy to use it makes sense to take advantage of this. This YouTube video called Web 2.0 Machine explains this rather well. And when you’re doing this, have a think about how that little search query works for a piece of video. It’s all about the metadata, a piece of jargon which simply means “data about data”. Give you stuff metadata and people will find it. If you don’t have properly structured metadata your website will just sit there with nobody finding it, no matter how lovely it looks.

< Week 6: first impressions

Next in the series: in conclusion >