My futuristic two cents

Futuristic blog posts are incredibly popular, and often very astute, but remind me of that wonderful Goons joke, narrated by Seagoon: “As I walked down the crowded streets, people seemed to know I was British - was it my bearing, the cut of my dentures, or was it the 8 foot flood-lit Union Jack tied around my head? I’ll never know…”

SEOs love to speculate on the “the future”. What I mean is, news in SEO is rarely understated, and oft repeated. And I don`t think that the future of communications, particularly in news and journalism, will necessarily be heralded by SEOs. But that`s not the point of my post. The point of my post here is to comment on what shape generally these “futurists” seem to see the web taking, and why.

Tim O`reilly, in his future of linking, talks about the “link to myself” strategy, which is a way to expand information within a site. He mentions that big sites are more and more linking to their own resources of information - whether they`re on-site glossaries or searchable archives - and the only outbound links processed are shunted to the same site`s pages. Kinda like nepotism, this obviously goes against the web as a knowledge-sharing, creative commons, and could be viewed as a type of hyper-siloing. Hey, Wikipedia does it with great ranking success, and owning a large site with many, highly resourceful and useful pages is an asset. So this is technically acceptable, and technically dubious, depending on your moral fibre.

The other side of linking is of course content, and with the boundaries of PR and news and blogging and online writing being threshed out as I speak, the future of PR is also often discussed, with many contrasting and often highly insightful comments. Social TnT commented that PR will soon become representative not of companies or of subjects (like Digg`s Tech or Gaming) but of the audiences who lurk in specific areas online. It reminded of that futuristic worldview in which people live in compounds that don`t have a microcosm within, but house a part of it - Germans, South Africans - and within that compound those groups will have a complete part of the whole story, i.e. a whole version of only a part of the world. Apply that to PR, and the implication is that audiences will determine how and where companies and services and initiatives are publicised, and in each segment, they will cover it in its entirety.

Where am I going with this? Websites are making themselves into hubs or fortresses of knowledge. People are responding to the noise and surfeit of non-peer-reviewed information by collecting at the gates of these castles, banging on the doors…

I won`t shoot myself in the foot by saying that is necessarily what I see the net as becoming, as again, I don`t think SEOs will necessarily herald the biggest changes. But by the sheer number of “net future” articles it is clear that SEOs are in a position to comment. According to two high insightful posts referenced above, I can see that information collectives is one way that capitalism and value will merge to bring the audience what it wants, and I think it`s a good thing for the internet. And that`s my futuristic two cents.