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San Diego, CA, United States, 01/23/2006 – 2006 may very well be the year that the switch from ecommerce to i-commerce, (information commerce), becomes much more noticeable. Google™ says it themselves in the first line of their company overview. Their mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” not the world’s largest business directory.
When the internet exploded in the late nineties, large companies and retailers muscled their way to the top of the search engine rankings, backed by deep pockets. But a combination of push-button publishing and Google rise to popularity, the living room blogger is now topping the ranks with a purely content site and a $0 budget.
Blogging statistics tracker Technorati reported in October that the current size of the blogosphere had reached a staggering 18.9 million weblogs, a number that follows an 18 month trend of doubling in size every 5 months. Meanwhile, companies are still trying to figure out how to create a business blog, or why they should create a business blog, or what exactly a business blog even is.
Some companies are starting to figure out that it’s not the blog itself that matters, but the fact that blogs are 99.9% content a source of consistently fresh information. For businesses to stay ahead in the coming years, businesses won’t be able to avoid i-commerce, offering products that compliment valuable, relevant information, rather than straight e-commerce with only enough content to describe the products.
What’s next? The convergence of website functionality with the simplicity and push button publishing of a blog. At least that’s what the folks at nGenuity Solutions, developers of Easy Website Builder are hoping. “Businesses can pay $50,000 to an SEO to learn the same thing, they need a smart way to serve continuously fresh content to survive online today,” says President James O’Kelly.
O’Kelly, a 10 year veteran of the technology sector and developer/architect for large corporations like as Intel to shoe-string budget internet start ups, says that we’ve been steadily drawing closer to the i-commerce tipping point for about 18 months. “Our custom software clients began asking for content management systems. They saw themselves loosing rank to sites offering more value-rich content.”
In response, the company developed the Easy Website Builder Content Management system that gives everyone the ability to publish, and organize fresh content with the push of a button. The company offers a branded free version of the software as well as a fully licensed paid version.
Whether Google is the cause of this shift or simply built a system around the wants of the general population is open for debate. Either way, online consumers expect more than a static yellow page ad and have cast their votes for information rich websites.
For larger companies, responding to this shift means integrating a simple content management solution into their online presence and staffing resources to manage the company’s content. Smaller businesses or those with smaller scale websites have the advantage with the ability to move their current data into content friendly website systems and keep them updated.
Whether we embrace the new i-commerce revolution or not, Google’s influence is undeniable and judging from their past, Google will most likely achieve their goal of making accessible, an organized world directory of information.
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