The results of a survey released at the end of 2007 show that small businesses aren’t buying into the hype of Web 2.0.

The study asked more than 300 small business owners in the U.S. to rate the relevance of different Web 2.0 tools as a means of obtaining business management information over the next five years. Only 14 percent of respondents said they believe that blogs will be very or extremely important. Wikis earned 21 percent with social networking sites and Web casts scoring 22 and 31 percent of the vote, respectively.

The results were attributed to small business owners wanting to know how it will help them. They want to know how will it expand or simplify this their existing business practice. I believe their reluctance comes down to two specific reasons:

1. Remember the hype and promises of the web in 1999-2001, and
2. A lot of what is shown is for social purposes with teenage and college students. Few businesses are shown being profitable with these ventures.

So what I plan is over the next few articles showing how small businesses, their employees, and their customers, can utilize Web 2.0. In these articles I plan to look at:

• What is “Web 2.0″?
• What is a Blog?
  • How do people use blogs…
    • to consume information?
    • to produce information?
  • How blog comments can help the author?
• How RSS feeds can be used for more than articles?
• What is a Wiki?
  • Building good documentation from Wikis.
  • Understanding the Wisdom of the Masses.
• What is Pod Casting?

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In a previous article, I asked, does your website look good? And if it (your website looking good) actually mattered?

Pop Quiz – did anyone go out an try to find a “pretty” website? Just curious.

If I had asked you to think of an ugly site, you could have probably come up with several examples easily. You might not be able to explain why they were ugly, but you could come up with them. People find it easier to remember bad things than good things.

Your site’s design shouldn’t be recognizable.

The fact of the matter is, if you easily recognized a website as being attractive, it actually broke one of the most important rules of design. The underlying rule is that design shouldn’t get in the way! Call it the form-over-function/function-over-form argument.

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Popularity: 51% [?]