WebProWorld Search Forum |
Newbie
In Need Of Help
I have been recommended to WebProWorld by a friend Steve who raves about all your top advise. I have recently started putting together a website all of my own.
Before I go to far I was hoping you might be able to check it out and make sure I haven't made any school boy errors regarding SEO.
SEO
for Corporate Websites
Although your corporate website does not allow customers to purchase products or services online, your company can benefit greatly from optimizing your website for the search engines.
Where
Are $'s Best Spent?
I wondered what all you seasoned guys would recommend as the 'best bang for your buck' for exposure for a web site? I could manage a meagre budget but wondered where you guys think it would be best spent. Paid directory listings, Adwords, Yahoo etc.?
Ratings
Slipping - Advice Appreciated
I'd appreciate any advice on my site...I have a list of
phrases that I check my rating on Google every once in
a while. About a year ago I came in the top 10 for...
Dynamic
Pages and SEO - A Little Help Please...
Our site is dynamically generated using ProStores (used to be known as Kurant StoreSense).
We do not get ranked well...is the problem that the ProStores pages' code is not W3C compliant html? We have not been able to get that changed.
Directory
Submission Services
I'm talking about just directories, not the search engines submission sites.
Are there any directory submission services that are worthwhile?
Link Building: How Is The Cost?
I need some income links to be competitive, so the question:
How much did I pay for 1000 links?? I'm not talking to
buy links. My question is about cost of link building,
exchange, etc. I know, there's others ways...
|
|
|
|
04.17.06
Collective Intelligence: Is Your Website Tapping It?
 By
Gerry McGovern
Collective intelligence will be a key competitive advantage in the 21st Century. Never before has there been a better medium to tap the collective intelligence than the Web.
The very first issue of New Thinking that I published on June 24, 1996 was about the potential of collective intelligence. The Internet allows customers, and other often-disparate groups, to organize and have their voice heard in a unified and powerful manner.
The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki is one of the most inspiring books I have read in the last ten years. It articulates the "big idea" of the Internet and a big shift in modern society.
Society has grown up. We can and are thinking for ourselves. Experts play a very important role but they are no longer unquestionable. We are moving beyond fundamentalism. The doctor, the policeman, the teacher, the politician, the priest, the car salesman-they are no longer above question.
That is why we are seeing such a reaction from the remaining fundamentalists. They can't bear the idea of a society thinking for itself.
Can the crowd be wise? Yes, according to Surowiecki. And in the right circumstances it can be wiser than any one expert. Surowiecki gives numerous fascinating examples where collective intelligence proved more accurate than the individual opinions of experts.
The best known example of the wisdom of crowds is democracy. Surowiecki's book begins in 1906, as it takes us on a trip to the Plymouth country fair with British scientist Francis Galton. "Breeding mattered to Galton because he believed that only a few people had the characteristics necessary to keep society healthy," Surowiecki writes. So Galton was not a big fan of democracy.
Galton came across a competition to judge the weight of an ox. Some
eight hundred people had entered this competition. "They were a
diverse lot," just like in a democracy, and Galton thought he could
prove how stupid the crowd was. He got the tickets from the competition
organizers and averaged the results. The average weight guessed
was 1,197 pounds. The actual weight was 1,198 pounds.
Of course, crowds are not always wise. You don't call for a vote
of what to do if your
house is burning down. You don't call for a vote every time you
have a problem. Collective intelligence is also not group think.
It is not about having a group of people in a room and asking them
to come up with a decision. In such situations, what you usually
end up getting is a decision heavily influenced by the dominant
figures in the room.
The trick of collective intelligence seems to be to get a representative
sample of people to make independent decisions on a given question
and to compile the results. So what has all this got to do with
your website? Think of Google, eBay and Amazon. They all tap the
collective intelligence through compiling and averaging reader book
ratings, buyer feedback, and third-party links.
For the first time, the Internet allows us to use collective intelligence
on a potentially massive scale and in a highly cost-effective manner.
Tapping the collective intelligence has many advantages. It brings
us closer to our customers and it enhances trust, as customers tend
to see websites as trustworthy that represent the views of other
customers.
About
the Author:
For your web content management solution, contact Gerry
McGovern. |
|
