We’re excited about 2010 – with SEO evolving faster than ever before, and quiet revolutions happening in what the web is and how we use it, it’s going to be a year of change and evolution. We explore some key areas for the coming year…
Digital Journalism – A Premium On Content?
Newspapers and traditional news reporting formats have historically struggled to make an effective transition to the digital environment, and have been forced to adapt their business models to fit the medium. Newspapers are for the most part free to read online, but supported by advertising and online revenue generation channels. Increasingly this has been a difficult tenure to maintain, as search engines, content aggregators and other websites (and increasingly the social sphere) distribute, syndicate and water down the inherent value of the currency of journalistic content. This may all change this year, as Rupert Murdoch has begun to take a stand against search engines ‘stealing’ journalistic content by including it in search engine results. A move to a something resembling a more subscription-based model may loom on the horizon, which may have significant implications for the way we consume content online.
Social Voting
Search engines are, to a large extent, responsible for how we find, order and use websites – they provide a measure of the importance and authority of websites, directing us to the best source for the content we crave. Historically, the only way to influence how search engines perceived a site’s authority was to link to it – and this option was limited site owners, bloggers and forum users, who whilst a vocal minority, don’t represent the wider field of internet users. Social media allows a much wider audience of users to ‘vote’ on a website simply by mentioning a brand, referring to products, and commenting on products or services. This makes the ordering and perceived authority of websites a much more organic, dynamic thing, and may change the way we discover and interpret websites to allow us to more easily recognise the strengths of SMEs in comparison to the big players, and to make it harder for size to automatically equate to authority and subsequent success. Likewise, negative PR is a much stronger tool, where brand mentions on Twitter, Facebook and other social sites in negative connotations could cause long-term, significant damage to the visibility and performance of a site.
HTML 5 – Evolution Of The Web
Historically, HTML was a language designed for, and mostly limited to, displaying text and images on the internet. The end of this decade has seen exponential growth in the capability of web browsers, javascript and the internet as a whole, and the major limiting factor for further growth has been the inherent limitations of the language the content is built with. Now, with HTML 5 in the pipelines, we may expect to see increased flexibility, interactivity and processing power within the browser, right up to experiencing entire 3d worlds rendered directly in the browser with no need for plugins or add-ons. While this is incredibly exciting, we still live in an age where it’s still necessary to design sites which will allow users of older technologies and browsers (small screens, internet explorer 6, and so forth) to browse with an equivalent experience. Has, therefore, the evolution of the web experience reached a plateau with this need for perpetual backwards compatibility, or will the potential for exponential growth of the quality of user experience drive a revolution for progressive enhancement, rather than simply graceful degradation?
Google vs. Microsoft
Google is a Search Engine. Microsoft sells Windows and Office. Are the lines between these giants still that clear? Google are increasingly making forays into new areas, and though their entrance onto the mobile scene came with fanfares and hype, their gradual creep into software, operating systems, desktop publishing and the workflow has been a much more subtle, gradual evolution. Similarly, Microsoft are scrambling to reinforce their web properties in order to secure their own digital space – the launch of the search engine Bing, and a renewed activity in web initiatives and properties shows that they’re not ready to lay down and die yet. We expect 2010 to continue to degrade the line between the services, products and market divisions between the two organisations, and for the competition to continue to drive innovation and improved quality.
Cloud computing
Not a new concept by any means, but the availability and rapidly decreasing cost of cloud computing has brought it into the spotlight for 2010. Most computers have a vast overhead, and no economy of scale. At any given time, I’m either only using a fraction of the processing power available to me, or pushing my system resources to the limit attempting to perform complex tasks. Neither is efficient, and cloud computing offers another alternative. Rather than using my computer to process information, execute commands and run software, why don’t I get a bigger, more powerful, more efficient system to do it, and just serve me the results? What if I could scale this, so that a thousand machines could work on my requirements in parallel? This is cloud computing – my computer simply acts as an interface to a vast bank of programming power, which allows exponentially faster, more effective, more efficient computing, and opens up a world of new options when it comes to heavyweight programming and development. The implications for security, privacy and the way we interact with information are also huge, and we’re only scratching the surface of the impact of the cloud.
