How to boost your website/blog traffic?

Steve Pavlina’s insightful thoughts about increasing the web traffic. Click here . In his blog he discusses about his personal passion to help lot of people change the way they think and providing the original content to boost a website’s traffice. Although he has taken a different perspective on the food preferences and caustic about it, he has really some good thoughts which could help us out in the long run.

Disruptive influences of Ajax

As Dion explains the disruptive influences of Ajax, which makes us think “Boy this is good!”.

The End of Software Upgrades, Fixes, and Security Patches: This is one of several major advantages that pervasive software gives you.  Since Ajax software delivers an application fresh to your browser each time you load the URL, you’re always getting the latest version, with all fixes and updates, automatically.  Any back-end software experiences the same seamless upgrades.  Traditional native software will never be able to compete with this and people will get very used to never having to update or patch again (often converting their data along the way.)

• Software and Data Available Wherever You Go: How many of us are tired of synchronizing their personal, work, and family computers with the latest software and files?  I know I am. I love it that great Ajax software like Writely lets me have my software, and all my data, wherever I am at the click of a URL.  I can effortlessly share it with others when I want and I never have to spend any of my time copying files to thumb drives, e-mailing things to other accounts, etc.  It makes life so much simpler and easy.  Traditional software can do some of this, but it’s just so much more seamless the Ajax way.  And because Ajax apps generally require no installation of software, you can run your apps and get your data anywhere you find a browser: at an Internet kiosk, cafe, library, friends home, etc.
• Isolated Software Can’t Compete with Connected Software:  Ajax software is delivered using the entire Web as a platform.  That means it can (with a little proxy on the server, provided by the Ajax developer) talk to and use any service out on the greater Web.  This has facilitated a dizzying array of mash-ups. And it means that software created from scratch is going away, as it should.  The best software is now highly integratd into the Web and leverages the rich landscape of services that can be found there.  Small example: The terrific Web 2.0 start page, NetVibes, now has Writely integration.  Never mind more classic examples like Housingmaps, which is an Ajax application that integrates data from two entirely different places on the Web.  Stand-alone software can compete in a limited sense here actually, but Ajax encourages and enables this way of thinking by forcing the software developer down the path of using lightweight Web services from the outset.
• Deprecation of  the Traditional Operating System: It used to be that software was tied to a given operating system, since much software uses a specific OS as a platform. Yes, Java doesn’t do this but it falls into the category of being its own platform for this discussion.  The issue is that Ajax software is almost completely operating system neutral.  Ajax applications use the Web itself as their platform and just need a browser with JavaScript and XmlHttpRequest.  And to be sure, some browser compatibility testing must be done, but that will issue will likely only decrease as Ajax development tools provide the browser abstraction automatically.  In the end, whether a user is running Windows, Linux, MacOS, or something else entirely doesn’t matter.  Ajax is even on mobile devices now.  This is enormously disruptive to the gigantic operating system industry which generally depends on being the most compelling platform for their target audience.  That just isn’t the case any more.  The Web is that compelling platform for an increasing number of people.
  
• Software That Is Invisible: This is a harder to define one but it’s one that I notice personally with Ajax and Web 2.0 applications in general.  I just get work done, I don’t even notice the software anymore.  I’m writing this in an Ajax editor as a matter of fact and one thing I realize is that I never worry about if I have the software installed that I need, whether I have the security permissions, if my data is nearby.  All of these concerns slip away and I’m getting done what I need to get done.  Increasingly, as I use Flickr, Writely, Google Reader, HipCal, del.icio.us, my web mail client, and others, I just don’t even notice they are there just there when I need them.  And I’m not spending time maintaining them, installing them,  or synchronizing data.  Those days are gone and I just don’t want to go back.  Traditional native software will never compete with this, it’s way too high maintenance, low quality, and clunky.  That’s not to say you can’t do abomidable things with Ajax but the Web just routes around the bad implementations.  That’s much harder with just a few choices for usable native software.

Web 2.0 vs Web 1.0

Here is the comparison according to O’Reily between the Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 world.

Web 1.0 Web 2.0
DoubleClick –> Google AdSense
Ofoto –> Flickr
Akamai –> BitTorrent
mp3.com –> Napster
Britannica Online –> Wikipedia
personal websites –> blogging
evite –> upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation –> search engine optimization
page views –> cost per click
screen scraping –> web services
publishing –> participation
content management systems –> wikis
directories (taxonomy) –> tagging (“folksonomy”)
stickiness –> syndication

Please feel free to add to this list and I will update them as we go on.

Powered by web 2.0

The following are some sites powered by web 2.0 by Don.

Social Bookmarking/Search/Invitation:

Simpy
Goovite
Furl
Spurl
Rollyo
Squidoo
StumbleUpon
RawSugar
Kopikol
SurfTailContent FilteringTechtiki
ScoopGo
Filangy

To Do Lists

GooTodo
Listal

Online Calendars

HipCal
AirSet
zEvents
EventSniper
Calenderhub

kiko

 

Web Site/Blog Analytics:

Measure Map
Google Analytics

Peer Production Content (News/Music/Listings)

Shoutwire
Millions of Games
Rojo
Last.fm
Pandora
WikiCompany
Glypho
Yazai
BlockRocker
Wists
SpinSpy
NowPublic
Odeo
WebJay
180 Degree News
Quimble
Riffs
ButterFly
Bandnews

Mash-Ups

Ning
FlickrMap
LivePlasma
CoverPop
Qube
Kayak
toEat
AlexaDex

Aggregators

Google Reader
SuprGlu
Attensa
fluctu8
NewsMob
Blummy
Fluxiom
MeFeedia

Start Pages

PageFlakes
Google Ig

Team Planning, Organization, Coordination, & Project Management

Planzo
Backpack
Zimbra
ProjectPlace
Doodle
ZohoPlanner

E-Mail and Communication

Meebo
GMail
myemail
Tempinbox
Citadel

Online Storage

Avvenu
SendSpace
eSnips
StreamLoad

Image Storage, Search, & Sharing

Fotolia
iStockPhoto
Riya
PhotoBucket

Mapping

Google Maps
Yahoo! Maps
MSN Maps
Wayfaring

Word Processing & Note Taking

JotSpot Live
Webnote

Web 2.0 Parts

TinyMCE
RSS2PDF
ZohoChallenge

Grassroots Web 2.0

Knowmore.org

Online Business Software

2ndSite
NetWorthIQ
ThinkFree
CampaignMonitor

Web 2.0 Social Communities

MySpace
Orkut
LinkedIn

Web 2.0 Command Line

YubNub
Ambedo

Web 2.0 Humor

Web 2.0 Validator

Hosted wikis for groups

PBwiki

Lego’s Robot

Found the post “Robots” in tech Memorandum and looks like we are going towards the future. This is like the “Robots” movie wherein the robots assemble the parts to make a child. It would be interesting how much hoopla Lego can create for such a toy. Nevertheless, can’t wait until August to get one for myself to assemble.

Future of Web 2.0

As “Don Hincliffe” indicates in his blog the future trends for 2006. The list is impressive and some of them are mind boggling. Number 5 is interesting. I came across some people who are working in the tech domain but not aware of the RSS feeds and blogs. Given this trend was talking to myself how the RSS feed could become mainstream but then clarifies that if any website which does not provide the RSS feed of some kind will be left behind and I agree with his assumption.

Going back on web 2.0, if we look back we have beautiful sites on our hands “delicious”, “Flickr” have revolutionalized the concept. There are some posts which highlight when we need to use the technologies provided by web 2.0 which I will save for the next post.