Steve’s Blog

Lately, there has been a lot of buzz about something confusingly called Web 2.0. It made its debut on the front of Time and Newsweek in March, but it still seems somewhat obscure to people I talk with. Does it come in a box? What was wrong with the old web? What’s different about this new version? Bear with me for two minutes, while I try to explain.

When I was a kid I loved to read a lot of books. Looking back I have to be honest and admit that most of them were pretty forgettable, plodding novels – I wasn’t reading "War and Peace" at the time. However, the kind I liked most were a genre called "Choose-Your-Own". At the bottom of every page, you would have a choice:

1. If you want to jump over the cliff, go to page 64.
2. If you will stay and fight the tiger, to go page 37.
3. If you will swim across the shark-infested river, go to page 88.

Eventually I even started to try and write books. The less said about that the better, but you get the picture. Those old forgettable, plodding novels I read are Web 1.0. The books where I got to take control are Web 2.0. This is not a revolutionary concept at all. Having a family, playing a sport, going to a bar and meeting people Рall of these are Web 2.0, or in other words, interactive. Watching T.V., reading a book, sitting in a traffic jam – all of these are Web 1.0. The new websites that are exploding in popularity are those that allow people to interact with the web in new and useful ways. Let me give just a few examples:

Zillow.com

Ever have those flyers from Real Estate agents that say: “In the last year, 1 house was sold in your neighborhood for $150,000. The housing market is booming!”? Go to Zillow.com and you can view whole towns and cities. Every time you move your mouse over a house, its tax-assessed value appears. Most of the homes currently listed are in big cities, but the potential is easy to see.

30Boxes.com and Tadalist.com

Most business people have a calendar on the computer or PDA, but how can you share that with other people like your colleagues or family who need to know what you are doing? The answer is simple, sign up for a free group calendar at 30boxes.com or Tadalist.com, which allows you to keep group to-do lists. Both are completely free.

MySpace.com and Facebook.com

The leading tracker of big websites (Alexa.com) commented that if you go to MySpace, "you will probably walk away with the impression that it is a joke – some kind of junkyard of personal pictures, blogs and random stuff clumsily plopped on the web."

Don’t be fooled by that. In the course of two years, MySpace has gone from nothing to being among the top five websites in the world. What it does is allow people to share whatever they can put on-line. MySpace is dominated by teenagers, while Facebook is its college equivalent. Both are worth around $2 billion.

Now some people might say that Web 2.0 means that all the good domain names are gone and we are going to be stuck visiting sites like Xanga.com, RubyonRails.com. and Orkut.com. Indeed, I’d love to have a dollar for every stupidly named site that came across my screen. Others will conclude that this interaction is the future of the web and why so many people are turning off their T.V.s and spending more time online.

What does this mean for you and your website? There are some simple rules you can take from these sites:

1. Most websites are too complex. They have too many features, too many buttons and too much to look at. Figure out what your website’s purpose is and make it as easy as possible for visitors to understand that. Web 2.0 is as much about ease of use as it is about technologically-advanced interactivity.
2. You can piggy-back on the success of Web 2.0 sites. If you run a real estate website, why not include a little explanation about Zillow.com and then link there? Your visitors will thank you.
3. Finally, why not start using Web 2.0 yourself? There are some excellent business tools out there, such as Basecamphq.com (Project Management), Campfirenow.com and Skype.com (chat) and Backpackit.com (organizational tools).

Children, Taxes, In-Laws… Why is it that some of the most frustrating things to deal with in life are also the most important?

The Open Directory (www.dmoz.org) is similar. Its vital to get your website listed by them, but it can also be a long and remarkably annoying process. OD is an important website in its own right but it’s results are also used by Google, Yahoo, AOL, Netscape and other large companies. Getting accepted means a search-engine ranking boost across many large websites.

History

The OD was founded because so many people were frustrated with the bad job Yahoo were doing of listing websites. Originally, the OD was called “Newhoo” and aimed to be an idealistic, volunteer-run directory.

Why does is have such a strange e-mail address? Well, the name "dmoz" is a combination of "directory" and "mozilla". Mozilla is a new name for the old Netscape browser that was popular in the 1990s. Netscape took over the project at an early stage and they themselves were subsequently swallowed up by AOL-TimeWarner. Yesterday’s “Open” and small start-up is now part of a corporate giant.

Present

Getting your website into the Open Directory is a hit-and-miss process.

Unlike Google, Yahoo and MSN which use computers do the job automatically, OD listings are maintained by editors. Some will simply concentrate on adding new listings. Others will check ones that have already been accepted. This editing process is the strength and the weakness of the Open Directory.

Although you can make a website submission there is no way to track its progress, to find out whether it has been accepted or rejected, or to find out why a particular decision has been made. Your website is entirely at the whims of the anonymous editor in charge of your category. Has your biggest competitor become the editor of your category and have they decided to block any application you make? There’s no way to find out. The OD does have a system for reporting abuse but it does not help its reputation by keeping so much of what it does hidden from the public. The web is full of frustrated people who want more clarification about how why their website or editor application is falling short.

Having said all that, one of the first things you should do when marketing your website is head over to http://www.dmoz.org and click on “Suggest URL” in the top-right corner. It may take anywhere from 2 weeks to several months for your site to be listed (or not) but over 5 million websites are in the OD and there are nearly 600,000 categories (enough for everyone). If you can deal with children and taxes, you can definitely survive the OD.