I agree that it’s all about Google and ads for many in last years. Well Google worked hard to achieve where they stand, not their fault that none were able to match.

Feeds adoption by readers is overestimated. RSS is awesome tehcnology and I like it a lot but only fraction of Internet actually uses it. On other hand adoption by publishers is very good so it’s only question of time – still taking years.

Decreasing profit is only another Internet bubble bursting, happened in the past. Sheer size of Internet and realtive ease for wide reach guarantees tons of good resources at all times. Only new aspect is that they may no longer be created with worldwide mindset in the future.

Welcome to my blog and thanks for extensive comment! :)

I couldn’t agree more with your observations. I’ve been on the internet since the beginning (for the general public) and its definitely taken a sharp turn here lately. I remember my first website and how easy it was to be listed in the first page of Hotbot, and with a little persistence, Yahoo.

Then along came the porn and everything mutated. No matter what you searched for, you were directed (and sometimes redirected) to a porn site. My site virtually disappeared, replaced by tens of thousands of porn sites using keywords for every word in the dictionary.

Then along came Google and the longed-for Google rank, but as you said, that is going away because they are now targeting demographics with both results and ads. But learn how to manipulate a site and bid on ads, and once again many of our sites were back on top.

Yet now everything revolves around feeds. Not many people, except to comment, are return visitors. And when they do, they are looked at almost like they are stalkers, or hogging the message board, etc.

Now that the net is losing its “profit capability”, I wonder how many sites will remain and continue to simply “put out” information. I think Google, as they have always done, is jumping out of the starting gate ahead of the rest. Because they are giving people a place to go, where ads and such will be able to be sold.

Not really research, it’s more of thoughts and common sense. Blogging just gives opportunity to work on it and shape it into post.

Great post…

Looks like you did lot of research to get this post out.

One of posts that was planned for some time and accumulated above average of my thoughts. :)

It’s just the longer I use Internet – the more people I notice who are not English speakers at all.

The faster my conneciton gets (we currently have boom of fiber optical channels here) the more bandwidth-hungry services I discover.

English is also my third language but I do not see that as a barrier to the Internet, it is quite the opposite. I see it as a challenge and my journey on the Net so far has greatly improved my English.

The other one of real interest to me is the slow speeds of dial-ups etc. In South Africa we have had ADSL for a while now but it is very expensive and it is only available in the bigger centers. This is the reason why most Net users over here are still using dial-ups, it is far cheaper and it is available all over. I do not have many local readers of my blog but I do keep them in mind. I will never do anything on my site that slows it down unnecessarily.

The Net, like most other things is changing. If this change is for the better, only time will tell.