The Web is constantly growing and changing. The key issue for users of the Web is to know what is there that might help them, or inform them, or entertain them, and to find out in a timely fashion without spending all their time looking. There are two main ways to do this, searches and summaries.
The most common way that users today find the information they want on the Web is by doing a search using one of the many search engines such a Google ( ). You enter keywords and the search engine sorts through all the pages that it has indexed and tries to give you the most relevant results. Even with this a search often returns thousands of hits. Also, since new pages are being added every day and many pages are constantly changing to reflect the current news or information, the search results may change over time. And slight changes in the keywords can also result in very different search results. Even with these limitations though, searches often provide the quickest and easiest way to find what you want.
If you think of the Web as one huge, constantly changing book, search is like looking up words in an index and then going to the pages indicated to see if they contain what you are looking for. Another way we find what we want in books is the table of contents. This provides a summary outline of what is in the book. It is hard to imagine a table of contents for the whole Web though. For one thing, the Web is different than a book in that the pages are not intended to be read in sequence. You enter and leave pages on the Web following links.
But there is something like a table of contents for the Web in that it organizes the Webs contents into a high level summary view, and that is a Web directory. Yahoo provides one of the oldest of these ( ) and there is a public domain Web directory that is available many places including the Google Directory ( ). A directory is a hierarchy of knowledge categories or subjects with links and descriptions provided under the categories. The general directories are huge themselves, so in turn it is useful to search them.
A variation on this is a personal Web directory or knowledge base. This has the same structure as these large public directories but is more focused on the particular interests of a person or group. Whole subtrees of the personal Web directory can be shared with others. A rather limited version of this is the bookmarks or favorites that we keep in our Web browsers, but the personal Web directory allows for better visualization of the information and adding more related information.
Another type of summary that is becoming very widely used is RSS feeds. These are a list of headlines with summary descriptions. The user can then click on a link to see the details. This is especially useful for sites such as news sites or Web logs where information is changing frequently. But they are by no means limited to that. Individual users can read just the feeds they are interested in using an RSS reader ( ). Web site owners provide these useful summaries in hopes that people will want to see the details and click through to their site.
Another variation on this theme of providing useful summary content in hope that users will click through is the proliferation of free content that can be added to Web sites. For example, a weather site might provide a weather sticker that shows a summary of the weather in a town. This is useful in itself. The users then may be more likely to click through to see details. Much of this is intended for Web site developers (for example, see ), but it could also be used by individual users with the appropriate tool.
Another useful form of summary is a personal portal such as My Yahoo ( ) or My Way ( ). These allow the user to select from a collection of information modules and arrange them in different ways on a page that they can view to get a summary view. These portals are typically restricted to the specific content modules that they provide and are oriented toward a generic audience.
One more form of summary is an alert or vital sign. These provide timely notifications, perhaps using an icon that changes colors, of an important event. This approach has been used for years for network and operations management and is now starting to come into use for individuals.
These examples of summaries all fall within a category of tools called information aggregators. Information aggregators provide a summary view of what information is available and allow the user to go to the information source for the details. At this point these different types of summary tools are not usually well integrated.
The next generation of information aggregators will support much greater integration, a wider variety of information modules, and narrowcasting to more specific information communities. For example, see Personal Watchkeeper ( ).
So the two most important tools for getting the most out of the Web are search engines and information aggregators. These provide searches and summaries, which are really the way we have always tried to make the best use of large collections of information. Search engines are well developed and widely used. Information aggregators are coming on fast.
About The Author
Ron Tower is the President of Sugarloaf Software and is the developer of Personal Watchkeeper, an information aggregator supporting a variety of ways to summarize the Web.
Dont you just hate the process of exchanging web site links Finding sites that are relevant, placing a link on our site, contacting the web master to request a link swap, waiting for a response, that may never come... you know the routine.
Of course no one wants to exchange links, not really. Yes, we want lots of links from important sites pointing to our webs, but we arent all that keen on having links pointing out again. We have worked hard to get visitors - why would we want to send them away again, and not just away, but maybe into the arms of a competitor Not only that, but links pointing out take some of your web pages PR with them. Wouldnt it be great if there were a better way to increase link popularity
In the last couple of months I have found such a way and it works like a charm. Oh I have done the hard yards trying to find high PR sites that wanted to exchange links with a low PR site. There arent many altruists in this game unfortunately! Most of the sites I exchanged with were not doing much better than me. Those that invited me to exchange links with them were either totally unrelated to my topic or were link farms.
I was spending a lot of time trying to figure out a new way to get links in. I bought link exchange software, which made it easier and quicker to find relevant sites, but the results were mediocre. You need a lot of links pointing in to make a difference to your ranking, and its hard to get more than a couple of dozen by link exchange alone.
Like all good ideas its so obvious when you discover it that you cant think why it took so long. What do web masters running information sites need, apart from lots of links New content of course! They have to keep their sites lively so that visitors will return. If they have an ezine it has to be filled with fresh content each time it goes out. Offering relevant content for free solves the web masters problem. Thats right, there is a great market for articles to feed this ever hungry machine.
When you write an article and syndicate it all you ask in return is that whoever uses it includes your links. This means that you get links coming in from a lot of sites, many with high PR and you dont have to reciprocate. If your article is published in an ezine it may reach thousands of people, after which the ezine is frequently archived, together with your links.
This isnt the only easy way to get links that I have discovered, there are others and if article writing doesnt appeal there is bound to be one tactic that does. If you would like to learn more about article writing and other ways to raise your link popularity I can highly recommend a downloadable video tutorial by Louis Allport. He teaches 7 fast ways to get links and ultimately increase traffic to your site. Most of them are free. Take a look: . This course is new and is being sold for a low introductory price of $24.95 for the month of December.
About The Author
Liz Beresford is a writer who also manages several web sites, one of which is .