The Social Web E-Book

Richard Seltzer

• Herausgeber: Seltzer Books
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 209

Beschreibung

This pioneering book, first published in 1997, details the process to empower businesses and individuals to build websites based on common interests and social interaction. It provides insights that are as relevant now as they were when the book was written.

Leseprobe

THE SOCIAL WEB: HOW TO BUILD SUCCESSFUL PERSONAL AND BUSINESS WEB SITES BY RICHARD SELTZER

Copyright 1997, 1998

Published by Seltzer Books

established in 1974, as B&R Samizdat Express

offering over 14,000 books

feedback welcome: [email protected]

Books by the Richard Seltzer available from Seltzer Books

The Name of Hero

Ethiopia Through Russian Eyes (translation from the Russian)

The Lizard of Oz

Now and Then and Other Tales from Ome

Saint Smith and Other Stories

The Gentle Inquisitor and Other Stories

Echoes from the Attic (with Ethel Kaiden)

Web Business Bootcamp (2002)

The Social Web (1998)

The Way of the Web (1995)

Heel, Hitler and Other Plays

Dryden's Exemplary Drama and Other Essays

Preface From "Flypaper" to Social Web

Introduction Let People Find You: Putting "Flypaper" to Work 

Chapter 1 Basic Building Blocks of the Social Web

Chapter 2 How to Design Web Pages Without Learning HTML

Chapter 3 The Content Question

Chapter 4 Who Owns What? 

Chapter 5 Build a Personal Web Site: Implications of Search Engines 

Chapter 6 Publicize Your Web site Over the Internet

Chapter 7 Making Your Site Global: Free Translation at AltaVista

Preface: From "Flypaper" to Social Web

When old friends whom I hadn't been in touch with for ten and up to thirty years started sending me email -- about half a dozen of them each month -- at first I was flattered. Isn't it amazing that all those people would be looking for me?

Then it dawned on me -- why should they look for me? They probably each have a hundred or more people who they once were close to (old roommates, business associates, etc.) whom they've lost touch with. And why, out of all those others, should they actively come looking for me?

With a few quick queries I soon established that they weren't looking for me at all. They were looking for themselves. They had gone to search engines like AltaVista, Excite, and Hotbot. There they had done what most people do at those sites -- they had entered their own name as the query. And since I have a lot of content at my Web site -- including lots of my writing -- many of my old friends are mentioned somewhere there, typically in the list of thank you's at the end of a book. Searching for themselves, they chanced upon me; and, delighted at that unexpected occurrence, they sent me email.

If I had wanted to find them, I could have spent a lot of time looking and might never have succeeded. But because I had my own Web pages and, by chance, those pages had the right kind of content, and that content was indexed by search engines, the old friends found me instead.

I soon realized that what I had done by accident, others could do deliberately for personal or business purposes -- setting out "flypaper" rather than going hunting with a "fly swatter." While hyperlinks are a way to point people away from my Web pages to other resources on the Internet, "flypaper" provides a way to draw people to my pages and encourage them to get in touch with me directly. We'll deal with that technique in the Introduction, and then discuss other aspects of the "Social Web" and it's importance for individuals, organizations, and businesses.

The term "Social Web" is not a synonym for "virtual community." Rather it refers to structural elements of today's Web -- such as personal Web pages, full-text search engines and Web-based forums and chat -- which you can use to help people connect to people and hence to foster the birth and growth of communities.

At its simplest level, as the "flypaper" described above, the Social Web just links two people together. They may or may not choose to make a habit of staying in touch.

But if you have rich content and engaging activities at your site which draw people to become involved and to link to one another, your site could become a "nexus" on the "Social Web" -- a place where many threads of people-connection cross and where people of like interest are likely to chance upon one another. Once the people links are made, relationships may develop independent of the Web site -- using email or any other person-to-person utility or even face-to-face and non-Internet communication.

Recently, "community" has become the Holy Grail of Web business. Virtual Community by Howard Rheingold (published by Addison-Wesley in 1993) provides an excellent grassroots, pragmatic view of on-line communities before the dawn of the Web. And Net Gain by John Hagel and Arthur Armstrong (Harvard Business School Press) makes an eloquent case for the theoretical importance of communities for building profitable businesses. But it is not easy to create a community on the Web today. It's not like building a physical structure -- a town hall or an entire town -- where all you have to do is hire experts to follow blueprints. Many chat rooms and discussion areas on the Web are virtually empty. Numerous fledgling community-based businesses, which looked great on paper have failed.

The Social Web of today is in many ways quite different from the pre-Web experiences of the Well, bulletin-board systems (BBSs), and on-line conferencing systems inside major corporations like Digital Equipment. When you connected to those systems you already knew a lot about the people there and perhaps even trusted them, to some extent. Even newsgroups were relatively small, and you soon became familiar with the active participants. You typically only belonged to one such community -- because of where you worked or because you chose to pay a fee. And once you joined, you had a finite number of choices -- there might be many topics of discussion but there would only be one place to talk about that topic, and it would be relatively easy to find that place if and when you were interested. Now the Web is totally open. Anybody and everybody is out there. And there are an enormous number of choices -- millions of Web sites, many of which would like you to feel like you are a member of their community. It is a much more elastic and competitive environment, which presents new kinds of challenges and new opportunities.

Over the last four years I've talked and written a lot about "community," defining it as a loyal audience for a Web site, and recommending that businesses focus first on building their community and then on developing the services that audience would be willing to pay for. Now the Internet has grown and evolved to the point where an audience isn't necessarily a community. There are many competing places to discuss the very same kind of content. It is now very difficult to inspire the kind of fierce loyalty and sense of belonging that members of the Well felt and to grow a community of that kind, with the kind of long-term business potential described in Net Gain. Yes, you feel some loyalty to sites that you return to frequently, but it's the kind of loyalty you may feel toward a gas station you patronize, not the loyalty of a church congregation or an Elks Club.

"Community" implies a tight-knit membership -- people who would go out of their way to help one another, people who would proudly identify themselves as members. What we see instead is far looser, more elastic, and dynamic -- a matter of habits, tendencies, threads of connection among people -- where some sites in fact grow to become important nexus points; but where true communities are the exception rather than the rule.

Fortunately, however, the opportunities opened by the Social Web are not all-or- nothing -- there are many steps you can take to improve your Web site and your relationship with your audience, even if these steps do not lead to the growth of a full-fledged community. As with a garden, you are not totally in control. There are no magic Jack-in-the-Beanstalk seeds that are certain to produce high profits. But you can prepare the soil and plant the seeds, and work hard to nurture the seedlings that may appear. Yes, you can increase the likelihood that a true community of interest will arise around your Web site and the activities and events which you create and foster there. But, falling short of that lofty goal, you can still get people to contribute interesting content for your Web site, to make contact with people of common interest at your site, and to build relationships with your business,

Before launching such a effort, you need

1) to populate your Web site with interesting and useful content and let the world know about it;

2) to understand and take advantage of the business dynamics of the Web; and

3) to focus the Social Web characteristics of your content and your activities so your site becomes a nexus of interpersonal activity.

In the Introduction, we'll take a closer look at elements essential for success of the "flypaper" approach:

o personal Web pages

o how search engines work,

o how people use search engines, and hence

o what is the "right kind of content" if you want to be found.

And we'll look at the kinds of unexpected personal and business benefits that can come from this approach.

Then, we'll cover other low-tech tactics that are important in building a nexus on the Social Web, including step-by-step details on simple ways to create your own Web pages and to publicize your own Web site. We'll also discuss the unique dynamics of business on the World Wide Web, how, on a shoestring, you can take the next steps to grow your audience and build a business or organization around your Web site.

Next, we'll look at the role of Web-based on-line discussions (forum and chat) to attract valuable content, build your relationships with your audience, and try to grow your site into a true community.

Finally, we'll take at look at key trends -- in technology and in behavior -- and how they are likely to impact the Social Web over the next 5-10 years.

This book is an attempt to arrive at practical, pragmatic knowledge. It results from discussions I've been carrying on with thousands of people on the Internet over the last five years, and yet it's still just a starting point. Hopefully, print publication will help draw into the discussion more people with more varied viewpoints.

Introduction: Let People Find You: Putting "Flypaper" to Work

The Internet began as a way of connecting computers to computers, for sharing files and resources. It soon became a way for people to connect with people, through email, newsgroups, and chat.

In 1993, software known as Web browsers and Web servers made accessing files over the Internet much easier -- a matter of point-and-click, rather than having to type in abstruse commands and lengthy addresses. At the same time, it made the look and feel of the information more appealing -- with easily readable text and attractive graphics. The early Web was a simple and effective way to connect people to documents and documents to other documents.

But now the Web has evolved back toward the people-to-people origins of the Internet. You could say that we are moving from the "Document Web" to the "Social Web."

Yes, the documents and the pictures of the Web are still there -- with lots of new fancy special effects. But the main attraction of the Web today, as it had been for the original Internet, is connecting people to people.

This change was made possible by personal Web pages and search engines. Ordinary individuals can now quickly create and post their own Web pages and find pages created by anyone anywhere else in the world. As a result, plain-text Web pages can now be either static -- like the pages of books in a library -- or dynamic -- inviting discussion and connecting people to people. The technology is the same in either case. The difference is the intent of the author and the author's understanding of the needs and behavior of other people on the Internet.

Yes, you can use the Internet to publish traditional material, producing electronic analogs of magazines and newspapers, where trusted authorities expound their view of the world -- one-way communication. But the real power of the Internet comes into play when you invite the audience to participate, creating a lively open-ended discussion which could lead in a variety of directions. Here works-in-progress are far more effective than "finished" work. A document posted on the Web can be a beginning, rather than an end -- a provocative invitation to explore new ideas and perhaps even start a "learning community." We'll talk later about "forum" and "chat" software that can make it easier to carry on discussions at Web sites and to let the participants at a site contribute the very content that makes a site useful and attractive. But it doesn't take such technological sophistication to make your Web site a nexus of the Social Web -- a place where many threads of people-to-people connection cross.

In fact, many businesses and individuals who are capitalizing on the Internet today have little or no knowledge of or interest in computer and networking technology. In the words of Robert Burton, "a dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant may see farther than a giant himself."

For instance, when I needed to check that quote, all I had to do was click my mouse a few times to connect to the Internet and go to a site at Columbia University (the Bartleby Project), which has a searchable on-line version of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (from an old, public domain edition). It took me less than two minutes to make the connection and find the quotation. To do so cost me nothing, and I didn't need to know anything about how computers and networks work.

Yes, we stand on the shoulders of giants. And yes, that has been the nature of the advancement of human knowledge for centuries. The difference is that today the giants seem to be wearing velcro, because it's far easier to stand on those shoulders without falling off. This means that almost anyone can play in this new arena.

To understand the opportunities of the Social Web, first let's take a quick look at how we got here, defining some basic terms, to make sure we're speaking the same language.

What is the Internet?

Networks tie together computers so they can share information and serve as communication devices. If my computer is connected to a network, then the words and images displayed on the screen on my desk may actually reside on another computer miles or even continents away.

The Internet is the largest computer network in the world. It is also a network of computer networks, growing as entire companies join, connecting all of the computers on their private networks to this massive public network.

There is no central point of control. Designed for the U.S. Department of Defense, the architecture was intended to make it safe from nuclear attack. When problems arose, messages would automatically find alternative paths to reach their destinations, without needing the intervention of some central authority. Also, the institutions which were connected to the Internet originally could connect any other entity to the Internet, without having to request permission of anyone, and then those institutions could connect anyone. Hence it spread very quickly and a became a global phenomenon. Even today there is no central registry or controlling authority. The only way to determine the size of the Internet is to conduct experiments, which lead to wildly differing estimates -- 50 million to over 100 million users.

For a couple of decades, the Internet was limited mainly to the education and research community. People exchanged mail and made files and vast libraries of information available so others could share them. Then in 1993, a small change in technology helped transform this information environment and make it readily usable by people with no knowledge of computers.

Researchers at CERN, the high energy physics center in Geneva, had developed the World Wide Web (WWW) -- software which made it possible to link information from computers anywhere on the Internet in a hypertext environment. For example, a word in a document on a computer in France could be connected to a document in Australia. The small change that made all the difference was the advent of "browsers," free or inexpensive software for PCs, Macintoshes, and workstations, which gave users the ability to navigate through the Web by pointing and clicking with a mouse. Suddenly, the Internet, which had been a complex, "techie" environment for researchers, became a friendly, easy-to-use multimedia environment -- a new publishing medium and a new kind of "place" to do business.

The US government played a leading role in funding basic research (such as that which led to the development of Web browsers) and making enormous amounts of information readily available on the Web -- information that is important to business and that previously was difficult to find or expensive to retrieve. And while in the past the U.S. government tried to restrict use of the Internet to research, education, and non-profit activities, now it turned the Internet over to the private sector and encouraged the development of Web-based commerce.

Today access to the Internet is provided by independent companies known as Internet Service Providers (ISPs) which cooperate with one another and provide a variety of services, some designed for corporations that require guaranteed service levels over dedicated lines and some for individuals who connect intermittently over ordinary telephone or cable-TV lines. Meanwhile, on-line services, like America Online and CompuServe, which originally were separate networks with limited connections to the Internet itself (like ponds and lakes with small canals leading to the ocean), have added full Internet access to the range of services they offer their customers.

Hyperlinks

The term "Web" derives from a basic characteristic of this new information environment -- hyperlinks, which make direct connections from one document to another. When, using browser software and a mouse, you click on a word that is hyperlinked, that's the equivalent of typing in the address of another document -- whether that document is sitting on your own hard drive or on a computer in China makes no difference. You don't need to remember addresses -- just how you got there before, or you can automatically save your favorite locations with your browser's "hotlist" or "bookmarks." Any Web page can be linked to any other, quickly and simply, without fancy coding and without asking anyone's permission. The resulting threads of interconnection resemble a massively complex spider's web.

The power and meaning of hyperlinks first became clear to me back in the spring of 1994 when browsing through the pages of one of the first elementary schools on the Web -- Hillside Elementary in Minnesota. A sixth grade teacher had her class use the Internet as a research tool and then "published" the papers they wrote by posting them on the Web. For instance, from a hyperlinked list of the papers, I could click on the one about dinosaurs and see the paper itself. And within that paper, instead of traditional footnotes, certain words were highlighted as hypertext links that would take me directly to the source of the information. If I clicked on the word "dinosaurs," I immediately connected to the dinosaur information and pictures posted at the University of California at Berkeley, and from there I could connect to other related information all over the world.

In other words, instead of having to go to a library to track down a work referenced in a footnote or bibliography, I could connect immediately to the source information, wherever in the world it might be; and from there can use other hypertext links to follow the train of my thought. In this environment, the electronic book no longer needs to mimic the paper book, but rather can become a new medium of expression. And rather than being limited to the material on a particular CD-ROM, you can access entire libraries quickly and easily.

Internet Culture

Keep in mind that the Internet is not just a network of computers, it is also a network of people, with its own unique culture. While the underlying technology will change and the companies providing the infrastructure and the access will change, the culture -- the Internet style of work and way of people interacting with other people -- is likely to endure even when the physical Internet becomes enmeshed with and indistinguishable from other communications/publishing/entertainment networks.

If you choose to enter this environment, it is important to keep its origins in mind and respect the basic culture. Entering this space is like entering any other culturally foreign environment -- like a Western firm going to Japan. Yes, you can do business there; but to succeed, you must understand and respect the culture -- the etiquette (called "netiquette" here) and the expectations of potential customers.

Here people often freely share their creative efforts, with no expectation of financial return. One finds here a frontier spirit -- the people tend to be independent, self-reliant, but ready to lend a hand to a neighbor in need. Surprisingly, new users, even commercial users, often adopt many of the basic tenets of this electronic society, with all the passion of the newly converted.

Here the culture encourages developers to share with one another, to borrow from one another and to build on one another's work -- rather than wasting precious time reinventing what's been done before. This means development happens fast and standards become widely accepted without the need for intervention by industry or government committees.

The promise of the Internet is that ordinary people worldwide would have the opportunity not just to consume information, but to produce and distribute it as well, at ridiculously low cost. Information would be abundant, much of it would be free, and anyone would be able to get to it easily. This environment would foster diversity and creativity and active participation in social, political, and environmental issues. Global electronic communities of common interest would flourish. Small, startup businesses would be able to reach world markets -- and regardless of size or geographic location -- would be able to compete on relatively equal terms in the new electronic business environment.

Personal Web Pages

The first Web sites were universities, non-profit institutions, and corporations. The universities and non-profits used the Web as an extension of older Internet technologies, to make reference and research information freely available to wide audiences. Corporations soon began experimenting with the use of the Web for marketing -- mostly making available in electronic form the same kinds of information that they printed (brochures, annual reports, etc.). They had their own computers and their own staffs of technical people. They paid for dedicated high-speed connections to the Internet and did virtually all the technical setup work and page design work themselves.

Soon the scene became crowded with contractors and small companies that would do many of these tasks for a fee. Design firms would take text and graphic elements and turn them into Web pages, or would design pages from scratch. In some cases, these were the same media companies that also designed brochures and produced commercial videos. Other companies went into the "Web hosting" business. They purchased computer hardware, loaded it with Web server software, paid for dedicated connectivity to the Internet, and then rented space on their machines to other companies.

Meanwhile college students, with free and fast access to the Internet by way of their schools, discovered that they could use free software to make their PCs act as Web servers. Their Web pages would only be accessible when their PC was turned on, and not very many people could look at their pages at the same time, but it was a technical achievement they could be proud of -- playing in the same ballpark as major institutions and corporations, and showing off their stuff. It was also an exciting social experience -- inviting friends to look at their stuff, providing hyperlinks to friends' pages and getting linked to by them, and getting email from total strangers on the other side of the world who chanced upon their pages. Often they would include hyperlinks to other sites -- spots they had found that had information in their particular specialties of interest or "cool" sites or sites of friends.

Meanwhile, Internet Service Providers, both local and national, began offering low-cost dial-up access to the Internet for ordinary at-home users, going head-to-head against well-established on-line services like America Online. As the competition heated up, many of these companies began to offer their customers "free Web space" as an incentive. Since these companies already had hardware and Internet connectivity in place, all they needed to provide to get into the Web hosting business was disk space on their machines and their customers, whether free or paid, could operate their own tiny Web sites. Typically, the disk space is provided for free and additional services -- like page design and extra disk space (for lots of content or graphics) -- are charged for. And customers can, with the administrative help of the ISP, obtain a "domain name" of their own and "virtual Web" space -- meaning that the address is relatively short and has some relevance to the content at the site, perhaps being a company or product name, making it easier to evolve Web experiments from personal play to business activities.