For a while there, the Internet and the World Wide
Web showed great promise. They whispered sweet nothings
in our ears, promising to be the voice of the marginalized,
the new democracy, the great equalizer.

But it wasn’t to be, for the Internet has a new
master. No, it’s not Google. No, it’s not
Microsoft. And no, it’s not even good ole’
Uncle Sam. They’re just caretakers. The Internet’s
new master is bigger than they’ll ever be, and
far, far older.

The Internet’s new master is the same master who
holds the leash of all traditional commercial media.

The Internet’s new master is money and power.
Not the capacity to earn money or the capacity to increase
power (although those are certainly nice fringe-benefits).
No, the Internet’s new master is the moneyed, powerful
collective. Those who simultaneously mould and reflect
‘mainstream’ opinion, values, and behavior.

I suppose we should have foreseen it, given the Internet’s
military birthplace. But then, we were young and optimistic,
and boy did we want to believe!

A little melodramatic? Perhaps. But fairly accurate
nonetheless. Let me explain...

The Internet started out as a network of computers
set up for military purposes. To cut a long story short,
the World Wide Web started out simply because it could;
the Internet was there to host it, and the technology
was there to deliver it. Both were heralded as the new
face of democracy – at long last, the voiceless
had a voice.

Of course, even in those heady days, we all recognized
some fundamental practical and technological limitations
which really threw a spanner in the works for the ‘New
World Orderless’ theory. To begin with, the great
majority of the world’s population didn’t
even have access to a computer, much less own one with
Internet access. In fact, that was still the case even
after the new master took the reins (and probably still
is).

But we had faith in the Internet’s potential.
I even wrote a paper in the mid 90s discussing the Internet’s
promise for empowerment, and I quote:

“Being such a decentralized, anonymous form
of communication, the Internet offers great opportunities
to the world’s oppressed – improved (anonymous
if desired) communications capabilities, and better
access to more sources of local and international
news, to name just a couple. At the same time, the
Internet poses great threats to the world’s existing
media and political powers, not only because of the
re-distribution of information (and, therefore, power)
to the populace, but also because of the apparent
impracticality (impossibility?) of regulating the
information flowing in and out of any country.”

Alas, I did not see the Internet’s true potential
for censorship and control... Content.

We often hear that “content is king”. The
logic of the argument is as follows. For some time now,
the lion’s share (some 80%) of Internet traffic
to the average website has been coming from the major
search engines. What’s more, when people use search
engines, they rarely look past the second page of search
results. Additionally, research suggests that being
number 1 in Google equates to twice as much traffic
as being number 2. This means you need to rank in the
first two pages of the major search engines – ideally
at number 1 – before your voice begins to be heard.
The only way to reach the top of the search engines
is to have thousands of links back to your website from
other websites. There are two ‘reliable’ ways
of achieving this goal:

1. Publish helpful information on your website and
   constantly update it so that others link to your site
   because it’s so great – keep ‘eyes
   on paper’. Some popular methods include news
   sites, BLOGS, folksonomies, journals, e-newsletters,
   and customizable web portals like Google Personalized,
   which allows visitors to choose (from a pre-determined
   selection) what they see, e.g. news, email, weather,
   stocks, etc.


2. Write helpful articles and let publishers of newsletters
   and ezines use them for free – on the proviso
   that they link back to your site. (These articles
   are quite often written by SEO copywriters, and they
   need to be submitted to established article banks,
   from which they are gathered by online publishers
   for free.)

In other words, to reach the top of the search engines,
you need to publish virtual reams and reams of high
quality, informed content (i.e. copy). And you need
to keep doing it indefinitely.

On the basis of this evidence, the saying that “content
is king” has become somewhat of a truism. But when
we look closely, the saying is inaccurate. There’s
nothing wrong with the logic; it’s the conclusion
that’s the problem. In reality, content is no more
king than was the sword. In reality, he who wields
the content is king (and I say “he” with
intent, as the wielder is generally male or some patriarchal
organization).

Even for search engine (SEO) copywriters like myself,
this is a task which is becoming more and more time
consuming, simply because more and more content is being
added to the Internet. To illustrate: In 1997, there
were an estimated 200 million pages on the World Wide
Web (K. Bharat and A. Broder, ‘A technique for
measuring the relative size and overlap of public web
search engines’ [WWW1998]). By 1998, that number
had jumped to 800 million pages (S. Lawrence and C.L.
Giles, ‘Accessibility of information on the web’
[Nature 400:107-109, 1999]). A mere 7 years later, the
estimate is now 11.5 billion pages (A. Gulli and A.
Signorini, ‘The Indexable Web is more than 11.5
billion pages’ [2005]).

In other words, nowadays your Internet opinion is only
heard above the virtual din if you can really REALLY
churn out the content. And that takes a great investment
in time and money.

Now don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying the
Internet denies us access to information. It certainly
doesn’t do that. But ironically, it’s the
Internet’s very openness that provides its greatest
censorship power. With 11.5 billion pages currently
online, and nearly 10 million more added each day, we’re
all starting to wonder how much of that information
can be trusted. We look for helpful content, and we
keep going back for it, but only if we trust the source.
And, as a rule of thumb, we only trust websites which:

• rank highly in the major search engines;


• have a high Google PageRank (PR) - PR is how Google
  scores importance. It gives all sites a mark out of
  10. Any site with a PR of 4 or above is generally
  considered fairly credible. More and more web-savvy
  people are using PR to assess site credibility and
  authority. (You can see the PR of every site you visit
  by downloading the Google Toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com).);
  and/or


• are referred to us by a friend, colleague, or industry
  thought leader (which usually only happens if at least
  one of the first two conditions applies).

The result... We only trust the very people who were
feeding us misinformation and disinformation for years
before the emergence of the Internet.

And where does this leave average Jo on the street?
Even if she has the education, time, and money to publish
a website, an increasing state of e-information overload
will likely result in the marginalization of her website
anyway. At best, she’ll be seen as an uninformed
minority; at worst, a muck-raking conspiracy theorist!

Several generations have wondered what they could achieve
if they could only get on TV. Television being what
it is, that wish never came to fruition unless you were
happy to appear on the Jerry Springer Show, Cops,
or Judge Judy, or you have what it takes to star
in American Idol, Big Brother, Amazing
Race, or Survivor. Then along came the Internet.
It claims to offer everything TV cannot. Unfortunately,
as it stands, the Internet is no more true to its promise
than TV. The vast majority of high ranking, highly trafficked
websites are published by powerful, affluent corporations.
There are a few anomalies, but they’re no more
than that. Like the ‘everyday’ people on ‘reality
TV’, the small-time stars of the Internet are the
exceptions to the rule.

But I haven’t given up hope. All previous comments
notwithstanding, I’m inclined to see the cup as
half full. After all, every now and then, when the master’s
back is turned, someone manages to slip the beast a
treat to get it to perform a trick or two (such as a
folksonomy). I like to think that my early days of optimism
were something more than idealism bolstered by naivety.
I still believe the technology of the Internet offers
great promise. I just hope that ‘the powers that
be’ don’t have too great a head start, and
that all of us small people won’t be pushed to
the margins where we’ll have to content ourselves
with a lifetime of chanting “Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!”

Maybe folksonomies are the answer – or the prelude
to the answer – or a part of the prelude. Or maybe
the Internet will turn out to be history’s
greatest hoax after all. I don’t know. What I do
know is that I’m looking forward to watching it
unfold. For better or for worse, it will certainly be
interesting...

About the Author

* Glenn Murray is an SEO copywriter and heads copywriting studio Divine Write. He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at glenn@divinewrite.com. Visit http://www.divinewrite.com for further details or more FREE articles.