Web Wide World:
An Internet Pioneer Looks into the Future of the WWIII Web Revolution
by Brian B. Carter, MS, LAc

Brian Carter was using internet bulletin boards back in 1984, and has been designing HTML web sites since 1992. Brian is an acupuncturist, medical professor, and author of Powerful Body, Peaceful Mind: How to Heal Yourself with Foods, Herbs, and Acupressure. He created PulseMed.org in 1999 to promote his alternative medicine services and expertise. Since then, more than half a million visitors have read his articles, and he has honed his web design, graphic design, and traffic building skills even further.

If you grew up in the 80s like I did, you know what WWIII means.

Nuclear Death! The End of the World! Bombs, Explosions, Bomb Cellars, the Nuclear Winter, the End of the Human Species!

Ok, enough negative words in big letters!

I bring up WWIII because it never happened. At least not yet. Reagan spent buttloads of money and convinced Gorbachev to "tear down this wall." And it didn't hurt that the cancer Stalin had inflicted on the USSR finally yielded massive system failure. And so far, we've kept random nukes and terrorists in check.

World War III is happening anyway. But it's not a nuclear war like we thought. It's a war of ideas and money.

In just two days, America will choose its new President. The most obvious things about this election have been the polarization of the American people and our media.

Because of the new media of the radio and internet, it has been impossible to ignore the biases of each side. And as one of the only people I know of who purposely listens to both sides, I find it frustrating, disorienting, and disturbing.

The salient point is that regardless of our niche
and our bias, our ability to get our messages to our audience is real POWER.

Back in 1992 when a College friend of mine named "Farmer" (Jeffrey Kean) graciously taught me some HTML and I began to explore the just born baby world wide web, I made a big prediction.

"This is going to level the playing field," I said.

I thought I was right, but I wasn't sure. It turns out I was.

I knew that didn't mean that just anyone would be able to play Walter Cronkite on the web- you'd have to have credibility, and the money of the big corporations would help them play the game, but the barriers to entry in this new digital media were almost inexistent.

Even so, I didn't even grasp the full impact of my prediction. I continued on with my life, focusing on everything but the web. That was probably good, because it wasn't until Google's Adsense program came along that things changed for me.

Now I am an infropreneur. I make money providing information. I have no employer. I am a Google 1099. And I love my new sugar daddy.

So, where am I going with this? I want to talk about what we might as well call the Web Wide World, and by that I mean the world as it will be after the World Wide Web is done with it.

The land-grab-of-now that is internet marketing will not last. As we build our internet empires, the profitable keywords are disappearing. New ones will appear as news happens, but it will be narrower. Competition will be greater. Positions will solidify. Rapid increases in growth will slow.

Like a new post-big-bang universe that slows as it expands, like ice that crystalizes into a fixed matrix as it freezes, the world wide web will solidify.

Jumping 50,000 spots in Alexa will become harder - impossible amongst those in the top 200,000. Web marketers will freak out as they realize all their old tricks for boosting traffic don't work. Websites that don't contain quality content will atrophy and die. Quality content owners will survive and buy their domain names.

But that's not the end of the world wide web. Our focus on expansive growth will shift to consolidation and optimization. Google and other search engines will reward sites that create highly navigable site structures.

And after most people have gotten on high speed internet connections, gotten used to using the internet for daily needs, it will become more and more clear how the Web Wide World will be changed by it.

My guess is that the strengths of the web that will become most clear are these:

• All visitor behavior is recorded, tracked, and analyzed.
• Consumers will give their business to the web sites that understand them best, since visitors that are accurately segmented and understood will be better served.
• Offline marketing will cost more and be less efficient. Some degree of immunity to traditional sales methods may continue to develop, and these offline methods may be less able to evolve with consumers.
• Consumers will migrate online to more personalized "web wide world" services.
• Traditional businesses that emphasize offline marketing will struggle, and ultimately lose to web-based businesses. Even service businesses will be transformed by higher expectations for sophisticated and flawless personalization.
• Niche communities will thrive, since geography will be less of a factor
• Fragmentation: Many ideas, lifestyles, and religious beliefs conflict with one another - yet these geographically disparate niche communities will validate more and more (and weirder and weirder) values and beliefs - so interpersonal communication offline will become even more compartmentalized. Separation of church and state will progress to separation of church and society. Politics will be even more taboo, becoming a matter of private and web debate. Despite the strengthening of diverse beliefs by these niche communities, the overall effect will be one of social fragmentation.
• More and more sophisticated and secure online processes will allow for online voting, which will increase voter "turnout" and provide more accurate election results.
• Even politicians will be expected to understand their constituents better. Public tolerance of partisanship and corruption will decrease as the digitalization of life reduces the number of excuses and rocks under which to hide evil.
• However, secret wars between hackers may develop, unless web technology somehow becomes impenetrable.

That's as far as I can go into the future without getting ridiculously science fiction on you. That's my glimpse into the web wide world. So let me give you a few words of advice based on the aforementioned trends:

• Get online and start building something. Spend at least an hour a day doing it. Grab as much internet land as you can before it's all gone. This is the wild west of our day. Don't miss it.
• Migrate toward jobs that understand the new web paradigm. Job security at unimaginative, traditional businesses will drop precipitously.
• Use internet statistics, tracking, and marketing for your own business, no matter what it is. Even authors can more accurately predict what the public wants to read about. Be creative about how you can implement this increased capacity for metrics.