this is justwebcontent.com

10: LOL
And ROTFLMAO, and STFU, and WT, and all the other acronymns. Save them for Instant Messaging or SMS on your phone. Good web content does not consist of strings of letters who no-one can remember a reason for any more. And the same goes for Smileys! >:(

9: secure
There is no such thing as secure: there is only secure enough. The chances of someone spending billions of dollars and thousands of hours trying to decode your shopping list is remote: but they could do it if they wanted!

8: solution
Web solutions, blogging solutions, email solutions, secure access solutions. In this context, a solution is the answer to a problem, but not everything in life is a problem. Besides, it just looks silly.

7: scaleable
The definition of scalability at Wikipedia is: “a desirable property of a system, a network, or a process, which indicates its ability to either handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner, or to be readily enlarged.” It is not the ability of a single webpage to expand downwards to infinity, or a spambot to send six emails to every man, woman and child on the earth’s surface, and 60 percent of those below it.

6: long tail
The biggest thing in search engine optimisation since keywords, or so the SEO gurus would have you believe. In fact, long tail is just another name for a market segmentation using broad assortments. Old style shopkeepers used to call it the 80-20 rule: 20 per cent of products bring in 80 percent of the turnover, while what’s left sells poorly and represents the long flat part of the sales curve — the Long Tail. With thought, the Long Tail can produce results; of itself, it is neither a marketing revolution, nor a guarantee of success.

5: robust
I had a bank manager once who used to describe his letters to me complaining about my £55 overdraft as “robust”. In the web context, most people use it to say: “I spent more than 15 minutes putting the site together and it won’t break at the first reload.”

4: blogging
Blogging is a shortening of the words “Web Logging” and it’s been responsible for an explosion of content on the internet, much of it interesting, informative and worthwhile. But it’s not compulsory. Save your blog until you have something to say. Please!

3: SEO
Almost everything these days is geared at SEO and while its importance is paramount, much of the stuff we think of as SEO is just plain common sense. There is no mystique to filling your content with keywords; just make it interesting. The search engines will catch on.

2: basically
Not necessarily a web word of itself, but you’ll find it everywhere. Basically, it’s a way of pausing before one says something and basically, it (apparently) gives the speaker some authority to what they’re saying. Basically, it’s a redundant word and should be left out.

1: web 2.0
Okay, so we all know what it means. Or do we? Tech Publisher Tim O’Reilly began touting the phrase in 2003 about internet applications which interact with users and get better as a result: things like StumbleUpon or Digg or deli.cio.us. Problem is, everyone else has their own definition. For me, the all-time worst offenders are people who think web 2.0 means: “Looks like a Mac!”

I’m sure that this isn’t a definitive list. What’s yours?

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 18th, 2007 at 12:56 pm and is filed under Content, Opinion.

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