Editor’s Corner:
THE WEB NEEDS SERVICE AGGREGATORS

While I was attending the DMA conference earlier this month I listened to various companies’ experiences in building up traffic to their site. I drifted off for a while to my BBS days. I remembered how so many amateurs set up BBS’ for fun and profit and the challenges they faced. The biggest limitation to the whole techno era of BBS’ was the lack of interconnectivity. You called one system and that’s all you could access. With FidoNet and many other of its kind, BBS’ found a way to pump messages from one hub to another and create a global network.

Here I am in the 90’s listening to deep pocket corporations who are going it alone. Some may partner with MSN, CIS, AOL or Prodigy, but many are flying solo. Each one is reinventing the wheel. This does allow for much creativity and design options. It also provides many new jobs and demands very high budgets to launch sites worthy of the Fortune 500 they represent.

Will the traffic be significant to sustain all this independence? There are alliances being set up, like Commonwealthnetwork.com or DoubleClick that work on arranging targeted advertising to appear at different sites and hyperlinks. But for the most part the average surfer is coasting on his own.

Many presenters at the DMA conference mentioned that search engines were becoming less effective. It doesn’t take long to have your listings show up so far down you’re no longer readily visible. And each month thousands more sites pump their listings into these search engines.

I think of the heydays of CompuServe and Prodigy. Everything organized, indexed, and managed. Even customer service could help at times. But now, out on the Wild Wild Web my connection can be cut off suddenly, many links don’t work, some sites take far too long to download.

We need more web sites to band together, promote and maintain themselves well, and make it easier to find them. Pretty soon the web will get so cluttered that a web address will have as little impact as a phone number in the telephone book. It means something to the person who needs it, but for the most part remains unknown and unnoticed. Just like the stars - we all know the North Star. But without the Big Dipper, the most well known constellation, finding the North Star would be hard. And for those stars not part of a constellation - why they remain anonymous except to the most learned of astronomers.