Sonet Journal

Its small gems like this that keep us all on our toes and add a sense of humour to an industry that takes itself a tad bit seriously at times. Yes, it appears that some of the aficionados of Web 2.0 get too far into it, recently I came across a web 2.0 validator I had to laugh and laugh hard I did, the sad part was it was a serious attempt to validate what is supposed to be web democracy! If you did not have AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And XML) on any of your web pages it failed validation. A friend’s website failed and his site met accessibility guidelines… now that is what I call democracy or an integral part of democracy having a site that is accessible to all. Not some site that because of merely having Ajax makes it a pass for web 2.0.
Anthony Parsons posted a link to this little gem that is a ‘poke-fun’ at the seriousness of web 2.0 called Wankr - Collaborative Masturbation Network. I’m looking forward to the satire and hopefully it will stay funny rather than get insulting or take itself too seriously.
On a note our GeoID page failed the Web 2.0 validation. The reason it gave we had no Ajax in the page… Err - last time I checked we had created it using Ajax!!

Three weeks I was having an online meeting with a colleague Paul Arlott about a new CMS build and its specifications we are involved with. Towards the end of the meeting the conversation turned to Google and its past year of buying up various services and producing new services. We joked that soon Google will buy the entire webmaster market, not only will they have webmasters running through hoops building SE friendly sites but will now hand them the tools to do so – we joked. We went further on to joke that Matt Cutts is probably listening in on our Googletalk conversation now and getting ready to de-index us for joking about Google where both Paul’s company Tolra Systems and my company Southbourne Internet would be sent to some backwater area where we would all be stacking shelves in the local supermarket until Google was ready to forgive us.

Where there is smoke there may be fire

Getting into my studio early this morning I decided to do some email catching up and noticed one that alerted me to a thread in Anthony Parsons SEO forum titled Google’s Secret Website Editor!

And there she blows…

Sure enough the rumours have started and it’s apparently on the cards that Google will build or are building a WYSIWYG website editor that will allow for updating of a website. Following links in the site it took me to a blog posting - How Google’s Secret Website Editor Will Drive Adoption of Gbuy which goes onto discuss TROGDOR in more certain terms (albeit still a rumour). The discussion is mainly based around the integration of Gbuy into Trogdor and easy it will be for site owners with no technical skills to get a site up and running with a payment system:

This editor would be a good support to the gbuy product. Small merchants, usually web entrepreneurs with some technical skills, have two ways to receive payments on their ecommerce site:
• Integrating with the payment processor’s API through SOAP, Get requests, POST requests, etc. This requires relatively advanced technical skills like server-side scripting, session’s management, etc.
• Creating a link or ‘html code snippet’ and adding it on their webpage. A customer would click on the link, get redirected to a page hosted by the payment provider, complete the payment, and then redirected to the merchant’s webpage.

Writing on the Wall

Could this be the end of smaller web firms building sites for smaller businesses? Will Google put a solid end to that market by making it easier for small business owners to create their own websites, well yes and no, hard to say at this point. Small business owners will probably flock to it under the misguided impression that by using Trogdor they will gain an advantage in the search engines, it will certainly be a lot easier for them and they will be able to cut out the small web firm or the freelance webmaster – for a while.
Thankfully for us we moved on a while ago to creating other web based solution for portals and are now more involved with project authoring and development for a variety of sites so the effect wont be felt as much. I know many freelance webmasters who do quite well in building smaller customised sites who may feel this effect, I can hear it now “why should we use you, when we have Trogdor which is free?”

On the surface it’s a great idea that another tool appears from Google that will make life easier for site owners and persuade more businesses to come to the web. Will it put smaller webmasters out of business or even effect medium sized web development like us, no I don’t think so. There will always be a great demand for full customization, security, branding, search marketing, mobile web and other web related services. Give it another five years and Google may have that tucked away as well.