I was reading the other day about experienced web users and their newly found apathy with the net. What this article intimated was that web users who have been surfing (is that still a word) since the outset of all-things-internet tend to visit and rely on the same, albeit limited, number of sites / blogs and they rarely use search engines.

Assuming that these people (myself included; and i happen to agree with the article in this respect) are the forerunners of whats yet to pass, would it be beyond the realms of possibilities that web 3.0 could be just what these people have become. i.e. will web 3.0 people generally become less reliant upon search engines and will the already established sites become even more popular? I happen to believe that web 3.0 will also include the emerging mobile web, semantics and the boundary between manual, everyday tasks and the web having more and more a blurred commonality.

But lets just say that this article is even partially correct. You have a site and have carefully been building it for a year or two. If some of what is said comes to fruition, unless you’ve reached some sort of critical mass, will your traffic and website for that matter pail into obscurity and then cease to exist? And how will you succeed in this environment? The answer, if a little difficult, does appear obvious. In order to succeed, it appears you need either mass original content (the stuff google clearly loves), mass take up by visitors or a slice of the online advertising market. Everyone else need not apply. As the image above declares, “every time you say web 3.0 another startup dies”.. Poignant words indeed.

Undeveloped domains had better watch out also. Regardless that “parked domains” have but a fragile existence anyway (despite the Pravda that those with vested interests spout) and a little off topic, but if either the ISP’s go a step further in intercepting traffic or MS re-code explorer 8 or 9 so that directly navigated traffic resolves to a page of search results there’s the end to the PPC market right there. However if, as the article intimates, web 3.0 users will only visit their bookmarked / handful of sites then how many repeat visitors will those lovely parked pages attract??