If you haven’t already heard, this week is Web 2.0 Conference week. I am really, really disappointed that I couldn’t go, but am still excited about what will come out of the conference. In addition to a dozen or so product launches, it is probably one of the most important conferences of the year. How important is it? Well, there are not many conferences important enough to draw participation from Yahoo, AskJeeves, Google, Feedster, Fast Company, Intuit, Macromedia and Microsoft just to name a few. That’s quite a diverse group of companies, but there is reason for the buzz and attention. Web 2.0 is a movement in the web software community that makes the web more interactive, responsive and basically a platform for applications. It is also founded on people, community and their relationships with others. If your answer is still an indifferent “so whatâ€? - let me be the first to tell you that the innovations that are likely to come about not only have the potential to drastically change the way we use the web but also could cause some major shifts in how the search engine marketing industry works. While I could spend a lot of time talking about the really cool applications and inventions (for examples see Ruby on Rails, Del.icio.us) that are results of Web 2.0 technology, I really want to talk about how some of the technology used in Web 2.0 could affect search marketing. Read these previous posts on The Moleskin for more background on the pieces of Web 2.0.

• A Technology Manifesto
• Web 2.0: The Web as a platform
• An Introduction To RSS Feeds

I am a little surprised that more people in the search marketing community have not taken more notice of what’s going on with Web 2.0. Some of the expected changes in consumer behavior that we can already see with services like Rollyo, 43 Things and Consumating have the potential to drastically change the search marketing landscape. Three things in particular demand close attention: RSS, tagging and AJAX.

The Impact of RSS feeds

As mentioned in An Introduction To RSS Feeds – RSS allows publishers to syndicate their content making it available for publishing on other sites and in news readers. This presents a tremendous opportunity to expand the reach of your content, but it also introduces an obstacle. With RSS you can’t be sure that the person reading your blog or web site content will be reading that content on your site. I personally use a plug-in called Attensa to pull feeds directly into Outlook so that I can read and react to new information without disrupting my normal daily activities. So while a visitor may find your site through a Google or Yahoo search, you will need to track them differently once they “subscribe� to your content.

Tagging

Back in the “olden� days when Yahoo first introduced the concept of Web directories, everything was based on “Taxonomy� or divisions into ordered groups or categories. The emerging theme in new types of search engines and applications is to base information collection on “Folksonomy�. Folksonomy is the practice of collaboratively organizing information using freely chosen words or “tags�. This basically means that instead of a pre-determined categorical structure the users of a search engine or application would cooperate to organize information into categories. This allows people to quickly group things without really having to worry about the underline structure. This idea produced the service TagCloud. TagCloud is an automated Folksonomy tool. TagCloud searches any number of RSS feeds you specify, extracts keywords from the content and lists them according to prevalence within the RSS feeds. In other words, it determines what information you might want to see based on what you and other people feed it. Tagging is an emerging paradigm but as more people “get it� and use it, tagging will change the way we classify and discover information on the Web.

AJAX - A New way to browse the web

If you want to learn about the origins of AJAX check out Jesse James Jarrett’s AJAX manifesto – AJAX a whole new approach to Web Applications. For real world examples check out Google Maps or Virtual Earth. If you are in the search marketing industry you should really, really familiarize yourself with Yahoo Instant Search and Google Suggest. These are all examples of a new way to build websites called AJAX. The technologies behind AJAX have been around for a while, but with browser standardization (almost) and increased bandwidth availability these applications are more feasible. An AJAX application removes the back and forth interactions required by a traditional Web application, thus making it act like a desktop application. The user doesn’t have to wait for a page to load, and in many cases, the application can be built to run on a single web page with very little screen refresh. This presents a huge opportunity and challenge for search marketers who will have to contend with information that is pre-filtered or possibly not shown because the visitor chooses a different search term from a pre-populated dropdown.

If you have ever sat in one of my training classes you have heard me say – “Nearly every single successful human innovation is driven primarily by our need for social interaction�. These changes are a direct result of behavioral changes that have already happened or changes we expect to happen. People’s social behavior will drive lots of the innovations over the next few years. Those of us in the search marketing industry need to sit up and take notice. It has been a while since I have felt that there was a disruptive technology on the horizon for the search marketing industry. Paid Listings was the last. Could Web 2.0 give us the next one?

P.S. In case you haven’t already noticed, the major search portals Google, Yahoo and MSN are at the heart (well close to it anyway) of these changes. It is more likely than not that in the next year more AJAX and Web 2.0 features will find their way onto these search engines. Stay tuned.