Hackers and the 30%

In the dim dark days long past, web design was not a profession.
In the beginning, before the advent of public search engines, the Web population was made up of the top 30% or so of the best educated and best paid in the US. People joined the 'Internet Revolution' to see what these future great minds were thinking and saying.
In those days, a hacker was more of a Robin Hood than a Darth Vader. 'Hacking' was a sport, sorta. It meant breaking into someplace just because you could. Hackers didn't take things. They usually left something to say they'd been there. A dark rose on a chemistry professor's desk, for example.
The Net was more humorous than commercial.
One of the most popular downloads was a tutorial on picking locks - not on a site called Burglary.com -but on the MIT site.

As books emerged predicting the introduction of HTML 3.2 (the current version is 4.x), Web Designer became a profession. A dot-com was just another domain. (Not for long though.)
The debate raged for years about whether the Web should allow business sites.
A lot of people didn't think it should. But the push into the new medium was inexorable. After all, the Web was populated with the most cashed up consumers in the country!

Web pages were often long. Hyperlinks moved the reader from one part to the other instantly. Philosophers rambled on for hours -in text- about how hyperlinks were creating a new mindset. A 3-dimensional concept of information: a Revolution in expression. Text and images aligned themselves analogically to the thinking processes of the human mind.
Some web designers became architects of the Revolution. They designed information to be understood in quick reference and depth.

The key to this Revolution was how to structure the information.
Page titles reflected the context. Headings set the information into outline form. Each heading was also an anchor that could be addressed via hyperlink, so the reader could move seamlessly through.
Keywords and meta data emerged. They presented the home grown search engines with quick references to the content. No one was willing to commit precious mass storage to comparing the whole content of web pages.
The nascient science of information retrieval traded amongst the gnomes and dwarves of the Net.

New Web Designers were trained to this structure to organize their pages. They have to be educated to it.

Twenty years or more later, new Web Designers have forgotten. Like the stories of ancient religions and societies, the lessons have to be learned again. The story could read like a fantasy novel written during a war. Dark forces sweeping across the World, changing, destroying, and building new places and things - until they burnt themselves out in their glory.
"Google has changed the way the Web does business" is the buzzing headline. It may be more like brushing off old shoes though. The structure is again relevant. In fact, it establishes Relevancy for a web page.
The Web has changed, but gone full circle. It's more egalitarian, and commercial. Instead of the top 30%; there are less than 25% who choose not to have Internet access.
New leaders earn their fortunes by digging up the treasures of the Past. SEO is really just applying the principles established in the beginning to a new Web.

SEO/SEM in Australia is a special issue for so many reasons. Join me was we explore. It will be a fascinating and informative journey. Sphere: Related Content