Is there any money left?

Is Web 2.0 just a load of hype? I have my suspicions that it doesn’t make money, but some aspects do have potential for website owners. Both RSS Feeds and social bookmarking seem promising to me (at least, if it’s Facebook, now that so many people are on Facebook). So I thought I’d give it a go.

I can’t see much potential for it on my Devon businesses directory, as the articles are mostly duplicated RSS stories and press releases. (There’s a bit of off-site anchor text keyword targetting for it though ). My chocolate website has original content, with more potential for social bookmarking, but probably a less nerdy readership (hence the emphasis on Facebook, which seems the most widespread and least nerdy option available).

So I found a selection of plugins from extensions.joomla.org to test out social bookmarking on my Joomla sites. The first plugin didn’t like my PHP version so that went nowhere. The next one seemed great: a ‘Digg’ button appeared at the top and a row of little buttons appeared at the end of my content items, but it didn’t have Facebook. The final one did have Facebook but didn’t appear everywhere I wanted it to. So I’ve still got them both at the moment.

I found a great RSS module from one of the same authors, which offers not only the feeds, but the buttons to add them to aggregators like iGoogle (which I actually use, therefore I think it’s handy and useful!) It did annoy me a bit by causing some code validation errors. So far I have fixed them all, apart from a stray ‘r’ which appears after the embedded CSS, but only when the module is on the right hand side. Huh.

But I am straying from the point again, which is trying out the social bookmarking plugins, not tinkering with the code behind the scenes. So I added a couple of stories to Facebook. I was pleased with one of them, but the other site seemed to provide the home page as well as the story, and more confusingly, it gave the home page meta description instead of the story’s, even after I deleted it. I tried various options with Joomla caching, but didn’t see any difference: strange. Perhaps I’ll try Facebook again later. Meanwhile, I registered with del.icio.us and bookmarked a couple of stories, but can’t really see the point to it yet.

So I’ll be keeping them all for now, and seeing if any of them work out well. I can’t see my sites getting Slashdotted (thank goodness!) but you never know, it might bring in some readers and friends of my visitors And I’ll be trying out each of these social bookmarking services myself, so I know what each one is about.

Next step: WordPress social bookmarking plugins for the blog

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 6th, 2008 at 9:02 pm and is filed under Technical, Uncategorized, Website promotion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.