The Unemployed Alcoholic Blog

Perhaps I am a little “late to the party” in this respect. Perhaps I am stating the obvious, but this realization has just struck me now, on this Memorial Day morning with such a vivid clarity like it has never occurred to me before. The time of the “my little corner of the universe” web page has come and gone, perhaps it was never even here to begin with. The whole point of the internet is collaboration, not seclusion. The thing is, unless you own a short, generic, top-of-the line domain (the ones that go for $100k+ nowadays), you will not be reaping substantial profits in the web business without thorough development that attracts, marinates, and retains traffic. I speak of community building of course… It has never been easier to create a community-oriented resource online. There’s Ning, there’s all kinds of PHP CMS utilities (joomla, drupal, nuke, etc.), there’s always forums and chat-rooms you can quickly integrate… if you’re too lazy to do that, start with setting up a survey script with a new question every day, week, or month, depending on what your current traffic stream is and how creative you can be. Even if your website has a ton of really great information, it is not likely to be successful on today’s web without an obvious, attractice, COLLABORATION element that would encourage your audience to stick around and contribute to the growth of this web resource.

Even when some of the most popular virtual destinations for the masses were seemingly one man operations such as Maddox’s and Tucker Max’s dirty humor pages, a collaboratie outlet for their visitors to rant, vent, and argue was ever-present, be it Tucker’s forum or Maddox’s beloved “hate mail” pages…

Ultimately, this should all result in a “stickier” website with a more interested audience, a peer-reviewed informational resource that’s richer in content, and just a more fun web place for visitors to “hang out” at, instead of a one-stop, one-click mile marker for the blazing internet traveler.

That’s all for today… Now let’s party. If you gained any useful insight from this or any of my other posts, please let me know. If it’s complete rubbish, do notify me of that as well. We’re all trying to get better, and we’ve all got to start somewhere… My current craft of choice is writing at this time, and if you’re not a bot, your honest input is much appreciated. Best wishes to all.