Branding and reputation go hand in hand  in business. Every business strives to become a brand that would stick in people’s mind.

Building a brand has huge benefits. It is a kind of recognition you get in people’s eyes and trust theat you enthuse in them.

Brand can be your answer to reputation building.

When you have a business house it makes sense to brand your business in spite of who is behind the business.

But online business is different.

Most of online business are being led by a single person team who manages everything from site content to promotion.

There are millions others doing the same.

So the dilemma that a new internet marketer faces is

Should I build a repuation for myself or for my business.

The traditional answers had been constant and strongly opinionated about building a name for your business.

I have seen people advising that your business name should appear on every link back to your website  like author bio, forum signatures etc. It was the thing to do and it was never questioned. But….

Enter Web 2.0.

The game has changed a lot. Web 2.0 has made internet highly interative, the websites have been virtually replaced by blogs, there is a constant buzz in the social sites and all this has changed the rules.

Instead of business, people have begun to see or rather ask who is behind this busines.

People are no more running after the big names.

People are more comfortable in buying from only someone they can trust, whom they can identify.

That is why you see every big company also has a blog and a public relation officer who acts as virtual face fro the company.

This has added a huge advantage to small business owners. They themselves can become the face of their business.

The social media and social sites let you connect with people. This can be a very potent tool for developing recognition for yourself and products associated with you.

In this era therefore it makes absolute sense to build a brand for your name than business.

Your business would be automatically branded along with.

What do you feel on this issue. How do you approach branding your business?

After the term was coined, it became a talk of the web and became ubiquitous. Everyone started using it with or without an understanding of what is Web 2.0.

Basic element of Web 2.0 is interaction and exchange of information. Though it could have simply been termed as advanced forms of previous web technologies but developers chose to coin a new and catchy name.

So it became accepted as new version of Web.

Here are few things that Web 2.0 has provided us.

Blogs

Blog is a term that is derived from the blending of the two words ‘web’ and ‘log’….Blog. Early in the history of the World Wide Web people could build personal web pages. It is true that not many people did build personal webpages but it was, nonetheless, possible.

Still, these personal webpages were static websites. The owner of the website could post information about himself or his interests but others could only read the information that the owner of the website posted.

He could keep an online journal that he could allow others to read but it was ‘read only’.

Then blogging software was developed. In contrast to read only, blogging software allowed users to post comments.  It was a huge advancement.

Initial blog platforms were pretty simple but today they have become like content management sytems.

Today blogging is very big business.

But it is not all that Web 2.0 has given us.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is more or less a by-product of blogging but it is based on the same basic technology.

Social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, allow their users to upload their own favorite site bookmarks so that everybody else in the world can see and use those bookmarks.

When a user uploads his favorite site bookmarks into his online account, a backlink is created to that site. When enough people click on the link, the site that has been book marked gets indexed and gains a rank by search engines.

It is a form of user driven advertisements and it is far more successful than any kind of paid-for advertising can ever be.

There are a great many social bookmarking sites and they have

Wiki

Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. Wiki supports hyperlinks and has a simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslinks between internal pages on the fly.

In short Wiki technology allows editing of material posted on a website by the poster or by others.

The best example of Wiki technology is action on the Internet is Wikipedia.

RSS Feed: The acronym RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is yet another Web 2.0 feature that allows the web to be driven by people. Those who use RSS content use reader or aggregator technology. Users subscribe to these feeds.

The reader or aggregator then checks the user’s website and when the site has new content, it is picked up and sent to the user. That is a rather simplified explanation but that is basically how it works.

A client based reader or aggregator is a stand-alone program that is attached to an existing program such as a web browser or an email reader.

A web-based reader or aggregator makes the user’s feeds available on any computer with web access.

Podcasts

A podcast is a series of digital media files, usually either digital audio or video, that is made available for download via web syndication. As broadband internet connect connections and wireless networks become more and more common throughout the entire world, the podcast or webcast is gaining in popularity.

While people do still read, they are better at looking and listening to information thanks to television, hence, the advent of podcasts or webcasts.

You can find and tune into podcasts or webcasts on almost any subject imaginable today.

Well, of course, there will be. Web 2.0 is fluid and it is every changing. New technology will be developed and as it is developed people will use it.

And, you might ask, just who will benefit the most from Web 2.0? It will be those who embrace the new technologies as they become available and it will be us…all of us.

The internet no longer belongs to the few and the privileged. Web 2.0 is responsible for this.

Most astounding thing about Web 2.0 technologies is that they are free. So everybody can afford to run a site without much know how.R

I know it is late but I am starting  discussions on Web 2.0. This is first one in te seriesDot com bubble was a very scary time for a lot of people. However, some survivors of the 2001 dot com bust insisted that the World Wide Web was more important than ever.

One of those was a man by the name of Tim O’Reilly. O’Reilly met with Dale Dougherty of Media Live International in 2004.

Out of that meeting the term ‘Web 2.0’ was born.

The definition that Tim O’Reilly gives for Web 2.0 is: “Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.

Chief among those rules is  to build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them.”

Blogs, social bookmarking, wikis, podcasts and RSS feeds are just a few of the technologies that are helping to shape and direct Web 2.0.

The Web before the dot com crash is often referred to as Web 1.0 now but only since the coining of the term Web 2.0.

These are only a very few of the differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 but they are major ones.

You will notice, if you look carefully that the commonality of many of the differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 Web 2.0 is driven by users.

Once the websites that could be accessed on the Internet were built and controlled by only a few and were certainly not ‘interactive’.

But today anybody with an idea, a few dollars and just a little know-how can build a Web 2.0 website that is completely interactive and turn it into a money-making enterprise if they choose to.

The technology is there. It is easy to use. It is accessible and it is relatively cheap and mostly it is free.

In fact old model websites  are now adding features like blogs and forums and propelling themselves into the future of Internet commerce.

The Internet has always been and still is a platform for information but with Web 2.0 is has also become a platform for participation.