Web 2.0, oil to cyber space

Not too long ago, if you were from Texas and had a little bit of land that only cattle enjoyed thus far and walked into an office on Wall Street asking for money to drill for oil, money were flying to you. A while after that, in the 90’s, oil is still a business but if you’re a geek stepping in that same kind of office with a dot-com idea, money would be coming in fast.
Whenever a new wave of resources or technologies comes up, people are fast to take the new road and fill up the unavoidable cracks of the beginnings. The cycle is so predictable; it’s almost a natural law.
Web 2.0 is one of those waves that revigorates adds opportunity and generates business and it has been around for long enough to mean more than just buzz words. CSS, RSS, Ajax and Web 2.0 do express now real and useful technologies combined with a modern design and architecture based on collaboration and usability to generate a refreshing and manageable user experience. Is it a new version of the internet? No. Is it a new way of thinking? Well if it is, is one that generates business.
Gucci.com is a popular web site that breaks every SEO rule (with JavaScript turned off, all you get is a blank page) and yet it is a reference for Web 2.0 website design.
At Seoul digital forum, Google CEO Eric Schmidt defined web 2.0 as a “marketing term” and being based on Ajax. But Ajax is not search engine friendly. So can you enjoy Ajax and please search engines? Well yes, just make sure the content is html. Web 2.0 may be based on technology (it has actually been made possible by the technology) and yet you hear SEO, SMO and “content is king” all the time.
In the end, users enjoy a simple to decipher html content page just as much as search engines. But are search engines the “goal” of a site? Good ranking can not be the target. Scott Orth completed a case study for one of his clients that used Ajax and CSS and as the user experience improved (which is also at the foundation of web 2.0), he enjoyed a 97% increase in rankings and traffic jumped 53%.
Amit Kumar from Yahoo said that, while technology is awesome, simplicity is also crucial so engines can understand content of page.

To conclude, technology is not a drawback and I’ll use it anytime since search engines will start to understand it sooner than later and then, you know, being first matters over being best. At least under the laws of marketing...