During my forays through the German Internet I regularly stumble upon projects that make me wonder. You will find new webcatalogs that would have already smelled like made-for-Adsense three years ago, blogs filled with pseudocontent that some machines could have done better and newfound social networks with names that can neither be pronounced by anyone nor have any use for any one of six billion people. The Internet is changing at high speeds, everyone who is relying on an idea that was already questionable a few years ago, will not only lose precious time but also money.

If someone would decide to start big with the production of black and white TV-sets nowadays, they would presumably end up with therapeutic help quicker than they would like. If we compare the developmental history of TVs with that of the Internet we can see that, today, it makes no sense to dust off Internet concepts from 5 years ago which have already failed hundreds of times or had to be drastically changed to make them work.

As for the project ideas, there are similar rules for the content. “Unique content”, which is often and rightly cited as an essential step towards good rankings, is often interpreted the wrong way. This is not only about Copyscape not being able to find any other sites with exactly the same sentences but about creating content that is unique. Rewritten Wikipedia-articles as well as rephrased press releases for boring “Gadget-blogs” do not make the cut. In the meantime we have the famous long-tail of searchqueries, which, back in the day, could be tapped by pseudosearchengines, fakeblogs and similar gimmicks, which is now in the hands of many of the “big ones” who recognized its possibilities and, at the same time, are in possession of huge amounts of old and good content.

Everyone who puts mediocrity online today, will start to have problems with it tomorrow and will be at zero again the day after.