Written by advertising consultant Tahir Dinç. (Contains personal views.)
I wanted to write something reflective, because change and progress are coming at a pace that is hard to take in. I met a computer in my second year of middle school. The year was probably 1998 and the weather was rather nice. The first time I had a machine opened for me at an internet cafe and sat down in front of it, the man working there came over and asked, “Web or IRC?” I remember saying IRC, and he double clicked on IRC with the mouse, opened it and walked off. I remember telling the friend next to me that whatever I did in the future would have something to do with computers. Not long after, three years later in high school, I had designed my first website and was trying to get it listed on portals like AltaVista and Arabul.
The early 2000s were exactly the era of the search engine opening craze. There were millions of search engines and most of the time we registered our sites with them one by one. Before the ready made modules turned up promising “register your site with 10 million search engines”, I would go to the internet cafe, buy an hour, and spend it adding the sites I had designed on a PC with no internet connection to search engines.
In the days before Google and SEO, the web grew slowly and DMOZ was the community system that kept a lot of websites standing. In 2004 I became a DMOZ editor. The part I would least like to remember is that, during the search engine craze of the 2000s, I opened my own search engine and asked a number of state institutions for support. Not one institution or organization had the depth of judgment to grasp what a search engine was going to mean for the commerce of the future.
The pleasure of the internet in the 2000s was extraordinary, and nothing that came after ever gave back the pleasure of those ten years.
The Internet in 2010
Google had taken the lead outright, in Turkey and in the world. The natural result was that a lot of local search engines, mine among the first, stopped work and got out from under the cost of running servers. The evening I shut down the search engine I had opened, I was rather sad. One way or another, everything I did had long since become Google centered. Google was very strong and its infrastructure was very fast. A word or a phrase you searched for was scanned across billions of websites in a few seconds and the right results came back.
SEO had entered our lives as the abbreviation of search engine optimization, and a profession had risen around getting to the top of the search engines. I was a senior editor inside the Open Directory Project at DMOZ, and a DMOZ listing was vital for a website to rank in any search engine at all. People doing SEO work would take a job from a client and apply to DMOZ. We would look at the site against certain criteria and add the ones that qualified. In those days I did not want to introduce myself as an SEO specialist, because; it felt as though it did not sit right with the rules of competition.
In the period when the search engine was a one sided power, Google had already bought YouTube. But; Facebook was a rather fine project, and it was born as the first force Google would have to share the lead with. By the start of the 2010s social media had entered our lives properly and the internet had moved into another age.
In 2006, while I was studying at Zonguldak Karaelmas University, Ereğli Faculty of Education, my high school friends came into my mind. I realized I missed them and looked for somewhere to get in touch with them or bring them together. There was nowhere. I decided to build it myself, and that became the period when I first got the graduates of a school meeting on a portal.
Before Facebook or Instagram existed, I had already put a school based project live. Of 5,000 requests for an invitation I accepted 500. I remember wanting to do the same for every school and university in Turkey. While I was busy wanting it, Facebook took the market with steady steps. The right project at the right time, managed rather badly. That is why I always looked at Facebook and Instagram with a certain sadness, and stayed off them for a very long time.
Stand Behind Your Projects
A lot of people around me describe projects to me, and a good many of them are in a specialized area and have a chance of working. What I want to say here is this: stand behind your projects, because; unless you put everything you have into it, a project has very little chance of succeeding. Today there is sadly no project born in Turkey that has gone national; we could not carry our own work through to the end. But; you can break out of that cycle and put your name to something large.
Turn every input and output of your project into mathematical terms, and set out clearly how it is developing. If you have an international project, get in touch with us about it. We are ready to support international projects in every way, financially and otherwise.
