.Com revolution - NYC
Have you noticed how nearly every where you turn a web address is looking back at you? In newspapers and magazines, on tv and billboards. Earlier today, as I was snacking on a Twix bar, I noticed that there was a web site listed on the candy wrapper. Twix.com Since I had the time & the opportunity, I went to the site to see what a candy bar web site looks like. It was set up cleverly & provided links to various fun sites. No coupons for free candy bars though so I was a bit disappointed.
The first time I saw a website listed in a television ad was in 1995 (or very early in 1996). It was an automobile manufacturer's ad. General Motors, I think though it could have been Ford. I remember thinking that the fact that a Fortune 500 company was including this funny-looking address at the bottom of the television screen proved that this internet thing was going to be bigger than we might guess. No way did I realize how big or how fast the internet wave would sweep over America (and really, all of the world's developed/developing nations)! In just a dozen years, not even a full generation, the world wide web has become indispensible.
Everywhere you look, web addresses are there. They appear in newspapers & magazines, in ads and articles. They are printed on soda cans, candy wrappers and cereal boxes. They are featured in countless television ads and even announced on the radio. It is the goal of every company, large and small to have an internet presence of some sort, preferably via one's own brilliantly designed website. If your company & budget is too small to warrant its own website, you count on being listed on somone else's website. (e.g. Best Nail in Niagara Falls, NY). I even had a website for a while for my knitted scarves. But I did not have any budget to pay someone to set it up & I did not take the time to learn to do it myself. It's gone now & I still have a pile of beautifully handknit scarves! No web presence often equals no sales. (But I digress...)
People use the web to find whatever they are looking for. I use it to look for reviews if I want to buy an electronic gadget and then, I research the best place to buy it (like the camera I ordered tonight, a Panasonic DMC TZ3). I use it to look up information about the license plates I take pictures of, like what is the reason that Nevada's plate says "125 years of vision". Honestly, I was not too successful in understanding that one, but I gave up the search since I was not too into it. In fact, I'm not even bothering to go back & find the sites I linked to so you can check it out. Sorry, if you want to know about Nevada's vision thing, you'll have to surf the net yourself.
Which brings me to yet another point that I would like to address (maybe on another day), and that is the multitude of new words that have arrived with the internet age! I was surfing the net to check out the latest dotcoms. Don't send snail mail, that is so 10 minutes ago! Send an email or contact a rep on the website via Livechat. But if someone im's you, it can interrupt everything. And beware of spam (wasn't that a food product?!?) and trojans (weren't those something else too?), worms that the early bird can't get, and viral marketing, which it turns out is not as bad as it sounds. And so on and so on, which I just googled to see if the phrase had its own website. It doesn't but I learned that Heather Locklear was the actress who starred in the 1982 Faberge Organic shampoo ad that launched the saying "and she'll tell two friends, and so on, and so on." (which coincidently was the year I graduated from college). You get the idea. The internet age is a revolution at least as influential as the industrial age, just condensed into a shorter timeframe.
Does writing my own blog (yet another new vocabulary word that I had to describe to my mom the other day) qualify me as a soldier in this revolution? With that unanswered question, I think I will call it a birthday and say...
Stay posted & fly safe.