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Much is being written about the success of sites like Groupon and Living Social. A recent blog post expressed concern that these kinds of location-based promotional sites will ultimately lead to merchants competing on price only. An excerpt from the post read as follows:

2010 was an exciting year in the world of online marketing. The Bing and Yahoo search alliance, Google Instant, new mobile devices and even a major motion picture about the rise of a social network. While it's hard to tell what the next year holds, I don't think anything is slowing down - in fact, I see momentum building even more and more.

Over the past couple of months, Google has made it clear it's taking local search seriously. In essence, they have reconfigured the search result page and algorithm so organic and local listings become integrated. Studies suggest websites that implemented best practice SEO tactics weren't largely affected by this change, as local optimization was likely already a part of the overall optimization strategy. In fact, it's been shown that sites that already had strong organic and local optimization saw their overall positions increase. Conversely, sites without a local optimization campaign that implemented grey and black-hat techniques (in other words, simply gaming the Google algorithm based on the most recent exploits) have or will soon experience an overall decrease in visibility and ultimately traffic.

I was recently browsing Slate.com when I saw a link to a slide show referencing Banksy and gave it a look. The page presents you with a link that pops up a slide show (figure 1). The navigation is simple for the slide show with standard text-based navigation at the bottom of the text. I was enjoying the pictures, scrolling through (figure 2), and then got to the 4th picture (figure 3).

Years ago, the internet was kind of this untapped void that we were all excited about. As industry, business, and culture have absorbed more and more of the internet into our daily life and processes, we have a better sense of what the internet might be able to do for us.