I thought the heart of 2.0 is the user-generated content aspect of it. In this case, because there are user comments in response to articles, it boosts the number of keywords that will, eventually, boost the ratings of the pages for those keywords.
Hence, when I went surfing for something a couple of weeks ago, I ended up at a lot of sites where people were talking about what I was interested in. Clicking the links meant I viewed their pages, which jacks their hits, which gives them numbers to show the advertisers, which gives them data for their media kits which will, they hope, increase revenue.
Social networking sites are only another way to generate user content. e.g., Flickr. You get users to upload photos for the sheer joy of it, then users come in to upload photos for the job networking possibilities, then they come in for the possibility of selling photos, blah blah. Meanwhile, google ads out the hoo ha for the cameras, equipment, film, etc. that's being discussed in comments. Since advertising online is all a numbers game, the goal is to get as many visitors as possible to increase hits on the ads.
The thing with this approach is that it just doesn't matter what the qulity of that content is. As long as the right keywords are being dropped, it doesn't matter if anything productive or useful is actually going on.
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