Shifting Sands

The shifting sands of the internet, the internet changes! Well yes you may think, it changes all the time, but the change is deeper than than that, to be successful at internet marketing, and be it that your marketing 'marketing' or  marketing your own products, ideas and publications, to be successful you really need to grasp the concept of the changes that are occurring at this very moment in time without you even realising!

Which changes am I talking about?
It's the way that people use the internet, until recently surfers would mainly go in search of a product or information by searching for it on search engines, BUT no more, this is NOT how a lot of surfers approach the internet any more, it has eveolved into more of a replication of the real world, you could say that the 'Virtual Internet World' is now STARTING, yes only starting, through Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, BLOGS, Youtube etc etc. I'm sure that over the next 5 years we will see a massive consolidation in this market, the winners will be the company that supplies the greatest user experience.
Cast your mind back just over 10 years, there was Altavista, Excite, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo, Webcrawler, Webbot, HotBot, Google and many many more, most actually have survived! but only a very few have gone on to become household names as we know, the same thing will happen with the new breed of social networking sites, my view at this time is that there is no candidate that clearly stands out like the winning horse yet but keep your eye on FACEBOOK, but most of all keep your eye on them all, and make sure your on the right boat when it sails.
But the actual change that you need to understand is that a large proportion of surfers now use social networking as there main point of reference, some of you may think it's just silly to be on Facebook and have a million and a half friends, but if you've got 500 friends, these will all be people with similar interests and similar views, which better source of good quality info can you  get when you want to go out for dinner maybe? 500 friends in social network group from a Town in rural Cumbria is very useful.
Rather than going in search for information on the internet, social networking allows you to list your interests and then you can wait for the information to come to you, you can then filter bad information out simply by dropping 'friends'.