It was a serene evening with a stunning sunset that inspired me ending up with the most melodic composition of my life. The cozy sundown and the emotive symphony reminded me my academic chums and I wished to transmit the masterpiece and dedicate it to them. Though I don’t own a radio station but my desperation took me to the new planet called internet as people have increased reliance on the web world for a whole range of activities — accessing everything from medical information to political news to driving directions, to shopping, to pay bills, to book tickets, to enjoy music, to watch videos, to attend lectures and so on. I too thought to find a river to get my creative juices floated away and started googling. I know if the words googling or blogging had been used 10 years ago, people might have started scratching their heads. But now technology has altered the pace of popular culture and added plenty of new words to our lexicon, although some have yet to make the dictionary.
At times it seems far-fetched that a single clack can bring people to an amazing virtual globe where every hit on the browser opens a new avenue.The web world has radically groomed the way commerce is conducted and transacted. Right from online retailing and marketing to blogging and broadcasting, I found there is a huge empty space for good brains to try hands in the global economy of online world.
According to the latest statistic I encountered with while googling, there are around 694 million netizens worldwide. India also appears to have embraced the bandwagon with a degree of ambivalence and tremendous enthusiasm towards this magical phenomenon. It is revealed that approximately 40 million Indians access internet regularly and that is jump of 700% in last six years.
This extensive and diversified use of technology and the busy schedules of lives lead most of Internet population to either shop or research for the products and services online. And to grab this whole new breed of potential customers, Online Retailing came in to picture which lead businessmen to make their presence felt on the web. Though earlier it was a hard nut to crack but today thousands of tools are available using which a local, small-town business with a very basic knowledge of computers can go global on WWW and get accessible anywhere in the world.
Following the trend of online retailing, Internet Marketing and Advertising are too on the go to boom up the industry. The various technical tools of traffic generation like Search engine optimization, Pay per click adds, Link building, Link exchanging, Email marketing, Google adsense and Google adwords hit the online economy incredibly well and opened the new doors of income for the netizens. While on my tour to this second world I got to see some statistics revealing that Revenue figures for Internet advertising registered a 35% increase from those of 2005. Online-ad revenue generated from search-engine advertising was 40%, while display advertising, including banners and media ads, generated 32% of total revenue. This tremendous growth of interactive advertising is supported by advertisers and agencies that have started to be acquainted with internet as a medium that can influence consumer behavior. Even the big chunks like Reliance, ICICI, and Vodafone etc built up their apartments inthe web world to captivate the net inhabitants.
It was even more startling to see that Blogging and Review Writing which were earlier used to depict creative thoughts and truth could not remain impervious from the radical era of internet marketing and advertising. Now people use them to increase their customer base. But positively it’s also escalating pocket weights for bloggers and writers.
Adding impetus to the emerging opportunities on internet, I was on cloud 9 to see that Online Broadcasting has become quite a revolution in the world of media, permitting anyone from anywhere to transmit his/her own programs, from independent music to news. Both Internet radio and podcasting use the World Wide Web to distribute media to subscribers. In the case of Internet radio, one can simply listen to the media being streamed across the web world. Podcasting, on the other hand, lets people download the files onto a portable playback device such as an iPod. At the end of this virtual journey I finally got a road to route up my music and much more to share with my chums and other netizens.
It is the internet’s abundance and miscellany of information easily found and conveniently shared, that make it such an integral part of modern life, reshaping people’s informational, social and economical universes. Thanks to Tim Berners-Lee who, way back in mid 19s introduced this astonishingly amusing world called www with which we have come a long a ways but still have a ways to go!
- Sadiya Naseem