About twelve years ago I built a few websites; mostly for myself, but also a few for small businesses and family friends. These were the days when the search market was split between sites like Yahoo!, AltaVista, WebCrawler, Ask Jeeves, Excite, Lycos and of course Google; when dial-up connections ruled the world and marquee text and frames were (almost) acceptable parts of website design.

Guest post by Massimo Ragnedda

This year as every year at the annual World Wide Web Conference the topic under consideration is the future direction of the World Wide Web.  The Conference will be an extremely useful opportunity to discuss and understand the social consequences and impact of the new technologies of Communication on culture and it inspires small and large companies to aim for a more dynamic and truly global world wide web.

Having started off as a web developer myself, I can totally empathise with a lot of issues that affect search engine optimisation on existing sites. A web developer has the complex task of building a website based on the materials they are provided.

In recent times events have highlighted that perhaps not everyone is fully appreciating the beast that is social media. For instance, let’s look to Qantas and Westpac as an example.

Qantas, following its industrial disputes, temporary shutdown and subsequent negative publicity appeared to try and use social media to leverage some positive sentiment.