Social Bookmarking and Power Linking

Just in case you missed it... the Web has changed.

I think a little history of the Internet is in order to grasp the big picture. I'm not going to give any dates (late eighties and early 90's)... I'll just give a quick run down.

I would say nearly fifteen years ago I had a dial up Internet connection that allowed me to log into various College computers, BBS's (bulletin boards) and Newsgroups.

The Internet was much different than the Web is today. There were no graphics... it was totally text based and everything was dial up. All you could do was basically post to a newsgroup, post messages on some BBS's and send email. Internet Marketing as we know it today did not exist.

In time though - a few brave souls ventured out of the shadows and began marketing within the newsgroups. This started wars between the "Purists" and new "Marketers" that I still remember to this day.

You see, the Purists considered the Internet to be their own little playground. They viewed anyone selling something as evil. After all... Marketers had the TV, the Radio, Magazines, Newspapers, etc, etc as an avenue in which to sell their crap. "The Internet is ours" was their battle cry.

They viewed the Internet as a way for them to communicate with each other without having to wade through all the BS advertising - and they could control what was being said. When the evil "Marketer" entered the picture, this all changed - and it changed quickly.

Once the evil Marketer had discovered the Internet as a new marketing medium, the "Purity" of the Internet, newsgroups and BBS's was destroyed forever.

The Internet was now becoming just another medium for Marketers to sell their wares. It was inevitable and only a matter of time before this happened. But the Purists fought it tooth and nail.

The Newsgroups and BBS's were now inundated and overrun with advertising. There was so much spam that you could hardly follow a thread or make sense of it. The thread may have started out discussing a subject such as "Microsoft DOS" as it's first post... but it was hard to make sense of it as the evil Marketers would post "off topic" spam ads trying to sell their wares throughout the threads.