Copyright ©1997, 1998 Richard Seltzer
This is the introduction of a book entitled The Social Web. Permission is granted to make and distribute complete verbatim electronic copies of this item for non-commercial purposes provided the copyright information and this permission notice are preserved on all copies. All other rights reserved. To correspond with the author, send email to seltzer@samizdat.com Comments welcome.
My
Internet: a Personal View of Internet Business Opportunities
by Richard Seltzer, on CD, includes four books, 162 articles, and 49 newsletter
issues that will inspire you and provide the practical information you
need to build your own personal Web site or Internet-based business, helping
you to become a player in this new business environment.
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.
In addition, a rapidly growing number of companies that are not ISPs (do not offer Internet connectivity) also offer free Web space. The largest of these -- Geocities, Tripod, and Xoom -- have nearly 2 million users each. Often, the personal sites are organized by type of content, and there are also participate in on-line "community" activities with people of similar interests. The content generated by all these personal and small business Web sites and related activities generates enormous traffic, which then serves the basis for advertising and other business models.
When your pages are "hosted" by an ISP or a Web-hosting company, all you have to worry about is the content. You create your pages on your PC, Macintosh, or workstation, and copy the files to the host system, where they are available for anyone in the world to see 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Today, free Web-space typically ranges from 2 Mbytes to 10 Mbytes. If you want everybody to see pictures of your kids, your pets, and your vacation in the Caribbean, that's not much space. But if you don't bother with graphics and fancy effects, if you just use plain text, you can fit 20 copies of the full text of Huckleberry Finn in that space. Not many of the people who are eligible have taken advantage of free Web space yet. So far, only a small percentage of the millions of people eligible for free Web space have taken advantage of this opportunity. Most simply don't know how to use this capability or why to use it or the broad social implications of Web publishing. We'll deal with all those issues in this book.
Malls and Directories
As more and more companies and individuals posted Web pages, it became increasingly difficult to find what you wanted when you wanted it. Some entrepreneurs tried to turn this problem into an opportunity by using hypertext links to group sites into "malls" and "directories," with lengthy lists of Internet resources organized by categories -- imposing order on the disorder of the Web as a whole. The idea was to create the ideal "on-ramp" -- to invite people to come in to this particular site because here they could easily see all the kinds of things that they might be interested in; and like in a mall, the visitor could be attracted to wander into this or that other store because of its proximity to the one they were looking for. They would spend advertising and promotion dollars to encourage Web surfers to use their site as a starting point, and commercial Web sites would pay to be included and hence to have access to the traffic of potential customers.
For a while it looked as if the Web would be divided into the "haves" -- those who could afford membership in the right malls and paid directories -- and the "have-nots" those who would be off on their own, hard to find, and with little traffic. And while the order of mall sites might be tempting, users would still have only limited ability to find sites beyond that organized area, detracting from the potential of the Internet to foster great diversity and creativity.
But at the same time malls were appearing, non-profits, departments of colleges, college students, and other individuals began doing the same kind of thing for free -- building their lists of interesting, useful, and cool Web sites, with hyperlinks to make it easy to get there. This was also a social exercise, with friends pointing to each other's sites, and sites with complementary interests and content, building relationships with one another and pointing to one another.
The largest of these lists -- called Yahoo! -- was started in the spring of 1994, by two graduate students at Stanford. They welcomed suggestions for new sites from Web site managers. The applicant categorized each entry and the Yahoo! team hand-checked the info. They built a database from these entries -- running everything on their student workstations. Their classification system was clear and comprehensive. Anyone could list their site for free, and anyone could use the Yahoo! directory for free. Their directory reached some critical mass of usefulness in the fall of 1994, and suddenly it was very easy to find a Web site that you wanted when you wanted it.
This approach undercut the fledgling malls and paid directories, and helped make the Web once again a relatively even playing field.
But the pace of growth accelerated as the media caught on and began hyping the Internet as if it were gold-rush, get-rich-quick territory. Then the rapid arrival of tens of millions of new users and hundreds of thousands of businesses and enormous amounts of new information threatened the very benefits and potential that had led to all this excitement. The medium of the many, or the common folk seemed in jeopardy of devolving into a new incarnation of "interactive TV," another way for a handful of mega-companies to provide passive entertainment and shopping opportunities to the masses. Yes, the content was much richer, but there was no way that human categorizing and hyperlink directories could keep pace with what was available. The fact that anyone could "publish" would be negated by the fact that nobody would be able to find the little guys; far too many sites would be competing for attention, and there would be no way to find the little ones. Faced with too many choices and no way to cope with them, the ordinary Internet user would follow the path of least resistance and listen only to the loudest voices. Only the companies with the financial clout to publicize their sites in traditional media and to build massive sites packed with compelling graphic, multi-media content would have a chance to survive here. Lesser-known companies scrambled to build brand recognition by paying for "banner advertising" at highly trafficked Web sites -- eye-catching graphical elements that are also a hyperlinks back to the advertisers' sites. At the same time, large numbers of Internet publicity and advertising companies started up that would, for a fee, help Web sites get more traffic.
In other words, when the Internet was beginning to change how many of us live and work and the repercussions were spreading through societies around the world, the rapid and uncontrolled growth seemed to threaten its ability to provide the very benefits that were making it so important and popular. It seemed on the brink of information overload or meltdown.
Search engines
Many researchers tried to find a technological solution to the immensity and complexity of the Internet, developing "robots," "wanderers," "spiders," etc. -- programs that would periodically search all the sites on the Web and generate databases that users can search at their leisure. The intent was to create an automated way of building searchable directories like the one that Yahoo! was building by hand. But the Internet was so immense that it took a long time for a robot to visit all of it and update the database; and there were so many users needing such a service that response time at such sites tended to be frustratingly slow.
Then in December 1995, Digital Equipment made available a new kind of capability. Their AltaVista search site (http://www.altavista.digital.com) indexed not just Web sites, but rather the full text of every page it found on the Web. And their fast and powerful Alpha computers were capable of rapidly handling the requests of enormous numbers of people. Suddenly, the ordinary user could find anything, quickly and easily. And anyone with something worth saying could be found, without having to invest in a media blitz. And people with common interests could find one another among the tens of millions of users, and diversity and individual creativity once again had an opportunity to thrive.
You might say that in its earliest days the Internet had been like the Rainman -- an autistic idiot-savant. It contained an incredible wealth of facts in its global "brain," but with very little built-in ability to associate one piece of information with another or to find what you wanted when you wanted it. With the coming of the World Wide Web, one site or document could link to another site or document. This added a whole new power of association -- so long as the people who ran the various sites knew about related material elsewhere and went to the trouble to insert pointers. In cases where a community of scholars made full use of this capability, it was possible to follow their threads of thought from one document to another. That was an enormous advance, but you could only venture far afield when others had created a path for you. Now, with AltaVista, users were actively in control -- seeking what they want and getting it without intermediaries. The Internet could become an extension of your own mind -- not someone else's -- building on your natural powers of association. In this kind of environment, location -- in time or space -- means nothing. Here the user is creator, not consumer.
And here, too, brand may turn out to be an obsolete concept. When bewildered by an enormous set of choices, consumers tend to turn toward the names and brands they are familiar with, as assurance of a certain level of quality and also as a shortcut to a decision. AltaVista puts the user in a position of control -- creation, not just consumption -- and focuses the dialogue on specific questions and needs, and then automatically provides a manageably small set of alternatives (the top ten matches). So vendors might be well advised to concentrate their efforts on providing real value, with up-to-date information and clear content, so they will be found and prove helpful when found, rather than investing large sums on graphics and special effects that may never be seen.
Flypaper
The developers of AltaVista and other similar search services, like Excite and Hotbot, intended to allow people to find answers to questions and to locate specific information that they need. But instead, it turns out that many people look first for themselves -- satisfying their curiosity about how often they, and others with the same name, are mentioned and what's said about them. Next they look for particular things that are near and dear to them -- often just out of curiosity, rather than need. It was this behavior and the fact that I had my own personal Web pages that led to me getting so many email messages from old friends -- them finding me by looking for themselves.
It's a neat flip of your usual expectations -- you connect with the people you want to by making their names and their subjects of interest findable at your site. And the same approach could also work well in the world of business, when you are trying to connect with potential customers or employers.
And what happened by chance in my case, can be done deliberately. When the number of long-lost friends finding me on the Web and sending me email starts to slow down, I could and should create a new page at my Web site where I mention acquaintances who I haven't mentioned elsewhere, and who I would like to get back in touch with.
You can create Web pages and organize the content on those pages specifically for the purpose of drawing particular people and particular kinds of people to your Web site and hence getting in touch with them.
A hyperlink is one-way -- it points from your site to another site, or from one of your pages to another of your pages. Yes, you can exchange hyperlinks with another site -- you pointing to them and them to you. And yes, if you have lots of good content, lots of other sites are likely to set up links to your pages. But with knowledge of how search engines work, and with many more people using search engines as their main means of navigation, you can set up your pages as "flypaper," so they work almost like reverse hyperlinks or people links, making it very likely that someone looking for themselves or for some other specific kind of information will find a page of yours.
Personal Web pages -- pages that an individual can create and edit -- plus full text search engines (like AltaVista) make it possible to deliberately create reverse links of "flypaper," to target pages and content for the purpose of drawing particular people and particular kinds of people to your Web site.
So how could a business use the flypaper approach? If you want to connect with a particular person at a particular company, and your phone calls and email are going unanswered, create a Web page that mentions that person and that company, and maybe mention topics that that individual is personally very interested in. Say, on that page, all the good things you've been meaning to say about how you could all benefit from working together.
Be sure to put the people's names and the company's name in the HTML title and in the first line of text, so the ranking algorithm at AltaVista will put your page high in the list of matches when people use AltaVista to search for those words and phrases.
You needn't have hyperlinks from your home page or any of your other Web pages to your "flypaper" pages, but do link from the flypaper back to either your home page or other pages you'd particularly want those folks to see. Just be sure to submit the individual URLs AltaVista and other search sites, like Excite and Hotbot. Just go to those search sites, click on "Add URL," and enter the URL of this specific page. That way within a day or two it will be in the index, ready to be found by your target the next time he or she does a search for himself or herself at AltaVista. When that happens, that person may get in touch with you, and suddenly your position in the upcoming dialogue is greatly improved because they contacted you instead of you contacting them. There are no guarantees, but it's certainly worth a try; and the odds are getting better all the time as more and more companies and people come onto the Internet that this approach could lead to the kind of business contact you want.
Using flypaper for finding jobs and applicants
As an example of the power of the "flypaper" concept consider how you could use it in the case of jobs.
Recruiters and head hunters who have positions to fill want to find qualified and interested applicants and at the same time want to be found by those same applicants. And job seekers want to find openings that match their skills and aspirations and would like to be found by recruiters and head hunters who have such positions. Both sets of people can benefit from
1) using search engines, and
2) posting their information on the Web in a form that maximizes the chances that the people they want to find them will do so.
If you are looking for jobs and job applicants, your first thought might be to go to a Web site devoted to jobs. But, according to Electronic Recruiting News, there are already over 3,500 job-related Web sites, and the numbers are growing rapidly. So where do you start? How many of them do you go to? And which ones are most likely to get you the results you want?
Perhaps you could use search sites like AltaVista to look through all of them at once? No such luck. In fact, job-related Web sites typically use databases to store their information -- even when that information is just text, like resumes and job postings. To get to that information, you have to learn the procedures and the query language of each site, and fill in forms, and enter query after query. Because that information is locked up in databases rather than presented as plain Web pages, it is inaccessible by Web crawlers; hence the information is never indexed by the major search engines.
Does that mean that search engines are useless when it comes to jobs? Quite the contrary.
Actually, I discovered the job-matching power of AltaVista by accident. My wife was looking for a job. Newspaper ads and job-focused Web sites didn't get her anywhere. Then she got a call from a headhunter who had found her resume at our little Web site -- using AltaVista. Within a couple weeks, she had the job.
When you think about it, it's logical that it would be far easier for a headhunter to find the people they want using AltaVista than by going to job site after job site and battling through all the different formats and query procedures. Today, there are over a million resumes posted on the Web as plain HTML documents and indexed by AltaVista. That means that anyone in the world who searches AltaVista looking for someone with certain credentials and skills is likely to find useful matches very quickly.
If you were a headhunter, which would you rather do -- check through dozens of Web sites, each with different query mechanisms, or would you rather just go to AltaVista or another search engine and find the people who had sense enough to post their resumes as plain Web pages? And if you are looking for a job, wouldn't you want your resume to be found by those headhunters?
Being found by the right job applicant or recruiter is even better than your finding them. Then the conversation takes on a different tone, giving you a significant advantage. You don't have to get their attention -- you already have it.
To increase the likelihood of that happening
1) Create a Web page that states the most important facts clearly and that puts the most important words in the most important positions. Don't use standard resume or job posting format. For a resume, the first words of the HTML title and the first word of the text should be "resume." Then should come the kind of job you are looking for and your key credentials. After the first couple lines of text, you can go back to normal resume mode, including your name etc. Just imagine the frame of mind the ideal person who you want to contact you and make sure you use words that such a person would be likely to search for. Remember that for the purpose of search engine ranking your name is irrelevant. The recruiter doesn't know your name yet. Don't waste valuable ranking space with any word that won't make it more likely that you'll be found by the kind of people who you want to find you.
2) Don't do anything fancy. AltaVista and the other major search engines index plain text. Graphics are irrelevant to being found. As noted above, databases are not indexed, so companies shouldn't put their job postings in databases. Also, on pages that use frames, the information inside a frame is not indexed. Also, pages that require the user to register or that you can only get to by filling out a form do not get indexed. Keep your job-related pages simple, and you'll be in great shape.
3) Then to be sure that your information gets indexed promptly, go to AltaVista and the other major search sites, like Excite and Hotbot, and click on "Add a Page" or "ADD URL." Enter the URL for each and every new page that you have created (one at a time).
General flypaper -- the first step in building a Web audience
The basic idea is that people using search engines look first for themselves and then for the subjects nearest and dearest to them. Hence you can use a targeted approach or a general approach to attract the people you want to get in touch with. With the targeted approach, to reach a particular person and/or particular company, you create a simple Web page that mentions that person or company. As an example of the general approach, at my Web site I have a list of every book I've read for the last 39 years. It's just a list. When I posted it, I doubted that anyone would be interested. I posted it as a lark, for the fun of it. But because of search engines like AltaVista that Web page draws lots of traffic to my site. I've gotten email from authors, agents, and publishers who found the list either looking for themselves or looking for books they have been involved with. I've also gotten lots of good correspondence from other people who love to read, and have then posted their comments and my responses and made sure that all that new content was indexed at the search engines to attract still more people with similar interests.
In particular I got email from Dean Rink, a producer for PBS, who was getting ready for a lengthy stay in Antarctica as part of the LIVE FROM ANTARCTICA II program. He was planning on doing a lot of reading down there and was looking for recommendations of good books, when he stumbled across my list. Like me, he had been keeping a list of the books he reads for many years. We ended up swapping lists of favorites and reactions to particular authors. I posted the correspondence at my site, and others joined in. As a result, I've discovered powerful and fascinating books that I otherwise would probably never have heard of.
Similarly, I had kept a record of every move of every tournament chess game played by my son Bob, since he started playing serious chess at the age of nine. By the age of 14, he had earned the title of National Master. And along the way, he was US national champion for his age group four times. Since I had all these games (nearly a thousand of them) on my PC, it was a simple matter to post them on the Web and have them indexed at AltaVista. Then he could use AltaVista to quickly find any of his games by searching at AltaVista for the name of his opponent or by a sequence of moves or by any of the other information contained in those documents. And likewise, any of those opponents who looked for themselves would be likely to find themselves at our Web pages and start a dialogue with us by email.
I also started a regular chat session about Business on the World Wide Web. This takes place every Thursday from 12 noon to 1 PM Eastern Time at http://www.web-net.org and is open to anyone who is interested. I take the raw transcript of the discussion -- where, in real time, the order of the messages is often confusing, with subjects switching back and forth and back again -- and edit it to restore the threads of thought, making it more readable and useful. Then I post the transcript at my personal Web site and add the URL at the major search engines. With over a year's worth of transcripts, dealing with all aspects of business on the Web, I get email from a wide variety of people who find those pages using search engines and who send interesting comments, which I then add to the transcripts and have indexed at the search engines, attracting still more people with common interests.
How can you apply this concept? Say you work for a school. Create a Web page that lists every single alum and the year of graduation and other public info about them. Add URL at AltaVista and you will soon start to get email from some of them. As you begin to draw audience to your site with flypaper of this kind, next you need to give them reasons for coming back, becoming a loyal audience -- part of a new on-line community. Offer to add their email address and other relevant info if they link. Add a letters to the editor page with selected correspondence or create a forum or set up regularly scheduled chat sessions with a host and pre-arranged speakers.
Above all, be open to the unanticipated value of saving, recording, and posting information of all kinds.
Flypaper for writers and publishers
Imagine how this approach changes how publishers and writers can and should find one another. In the traditional mode, acquisition editors spent years building contacts with just the right people so they would be able to find talented writers and sign promising books. In the new mode, those same editors can find writers and books -- the new products that their companies depend upon -- far more quickly by scouting on the Internet. And the individual writer has far more opportunity than in the past. Instead of the submitting a manuscript to publishers (typically one at a time), the writer can post the material on the Web, and publicize that it's available by making sure that it's indexed by AltaVista and the other major search engines. That approach raises the chances that an editor will find you, and even if that doesn't happen, your work doesn't just gather dust. Rather, you reach an audience, perhaps leading to correspondence and acquaintance with like-minded people, and your writing can improve from the feedback and what you learn from your on-line experiences.
I've seen several recent instances when being found by people using AltaVista has led to interesting business opportunities. Ebooks Multimedia in San Francisco, maker of interactive CD ROMs for children, was looking for content that they could turn into product. Using search engines, they found my book The Lizard of Oz at my Web site. This is a book that I self-published 22 years ago, and which had simply been gathering dust. Within about a week of their first contacting me, we had a signed contract, and they are now at work on the project.
Soon thereafter, a movie producer in Iceland looking for new material found my never-produced screenplay Spit and Polish. That's not likely to lead anywhere, but it's an opportunity that I would never have dreamed of pursuing actively myself.
And just a couple weeks ago, I got email from someone who found a stage play of mine -- Amythos -- at my Web site. She works for a professional theater in Spokane, Washington, and is interested in producing this play, which I wrote 25 years ago and which has never before been staged.
In all those cases, instead of my having to identify prospects, write query letters, and submit manuscripts -- which takes time, effort, and money -- people who were looking for that kind of material found me. And because they made the first contact, the conversation started at a different level -- they had a particular need, and they had already determined that my work might fill it.
The most dramatic instance of this principle was totally unexpected -- a kind of opportunity that I would never have dreamt of. A Gary Trudeau fan, looking for a copy of Bull Tales (Trudeau's first book, published back when he was an undergraduate at Yale), found it mentioned at my Web site in a list I have there of every book I've read over the last 39 years. He sent me email to find out if I still had a copy. He also noticed at my site that my daughter (now a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence) is into acting. It turns out that he is the writer/producer of several popular TV shows, and she was in LA over the summer acting in a movie written and produced by my sister Sallie. After a few friendly email messages, I wound up trading my copy of the book for my daughter to get an audition for a possible part in an episode of one of those TV shows. Nothing immediate resulted, but she learned a lot from the auditioning experience and made contacts that could prove important in the future.
These experiences taught me not to limit my opportunities to my own
imagination. Don't presume that people won't be interested in your material.
Don't presume that you know the markets and the potential buyers. By making
lots of material available on the Web and making sure that it's indexed
at the major search sites, you open up possibilities that you probably
never dreamt of. Sometimes you'll be able to win by indirection -- hitting
your target without knowing what the target is; not limiting yourself to
your own imagination, but rather opening up to the imaginations of the
rest of the world.
The rest of The Social Web by Richard Seltzer
My
Internet: a Personal View of Internet Business Opportunities
by Richard Seltzer, on CD, includes four books, 162 articles, and 49 newsletter
issues that will inspire you and provide the practical information you
need to build your own personal Web site or Internet-based business, helping
you to become a player in this new business environment.
Web
Business Boot Camp: Hands-on Internet lessons for manager, entrepreneurs,
and professionals by Richard Seltzer (Wiley, 2002).
No-nonsense guide targets activities that anyone can perform to achieve
online business success.
Reviews.
Can we help you build an Internet business? Richard Seltzer is an independent Internet writer/speaker/consultant. Click here for details. or send email to seltzer@samizdat.com
This site is Published by B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132. (617) 469-2269. seltzer@samizdat.com
Return to B&R Samizdat Express
Check our sitemap page www.samizdat.com/sitemap.html from which you can get to any other page at this site in one click.
<
| Internet Business Showcase: | |||
Dog Training and Pet Care Veterinary, Dog/Cat Veterinarians |
Viatical Settlements RFID Tags, RFID Readers Link Popularity & Link Exchanges |
Hair Restoration for Hair Loss Hair Restoration Plastic Surgery & Surgeons |
Used Cars Guide Homecoming & Prom Dresses Dropship & Wholesale Sources |