Tuesday, July 15, 2008

The Internet Culture and The Effect It Brings To People


The Internet culture has not been showing signs of slowing this trend – this fad toward the never ending quest for human communication even to places wherein real human contact is not possible. There are some people who find comfort when they are with their computers – online. Even if face-to-face interaction is not achieved, they still can seek friendship in cyberspace. Virtual friends gather at imaginary meeting places. In these cyber spaces, they interact with and among each other, they open topics for debates, they open themselves to the virtual public. It is no doubt, therefore, that relationships of all kinds are establish because of the Internet. But, the very fact that this form of communication emanates from distant participants, there is a real impact on this.

Because the interaction is no longer face-to-face, there is already lesser social accountability demanded of one who says something rude in an online chat room than of one who offends someone on face-to-face social gatherings. If one person says something awful online, the act would seem nearly free of consequences. The offender need no subjection to emotional discomfort that could possibly arise when the same situation occurs, only face-to-face.

Friday, July 4, 2008

More Digital on traffic

Eventually, anyone and everyone who runs a blog of their own face two issues. Firstly, how to get people to read the blog, and drive traffic. This is difficult, and can sometimes feel like something of an uphill struggle. The second challenge is how to turn the blog you spend hours on each day/week/month into a money-making website, taking the step from casual autobiography and commentary to an actual business.

So how does one solve these two problems? There are a thousand different blogs that cover similar issues, news, thoughts and opinions, and years into web 2.0, everything that could exist, usually does exist. Loads of blogging experts, from the 'Huffington Post Guide to Blogging' to Problogger.com, say the key is simply to find a subject and stick to it.

But sometimes it's just not that simple. Of course, there's a shed-load of advice on the internet – in fact, a blogger on the MoreDigital team recently spoke about traffic and using tags to generate more of it, and it's posts like these that construct a more realistic approach to making money out of a website. If you're willing to put the time in on the SEO side of things, it's going to be a far shorter haul out of the dungeons of internet obscurity and into the top pages on Digg and Reddit.

There's a ton of ways to start raking in hits and correlating that with cash generated as a result, from text adverts to Google AdSense, which proves there are methods out there that aren't out to scam the visitors to your site. So if I was to write a post about the new Xbox 360 (to pick a current topic out of thin air) and send it to every aggregate site and use fifty different relevant tags, the hits would indeed start flooding in. However, if I then choreographed it with a few relevant adverts and text ad links, I reckon I could make a decent amount of money.

The main challenge is finding a way to do that for many different posts on a daily basis. It's not an easy task constantly creating engaging and well-researched, in-depth content that's light enough for a wide-ranging readership demographic, whilst maintaining enough detail to obtain a cult popularity and social standing within the journalistic community for that particular industry.

So now all that's left is to start working up a plan, and in the mean time, use the advice of the Moredigital.com blogging crew alongside other sources, and begin to work up my web presence. World domination and financial super-success await me! To the keyboard! Oh, wait...