KnowThis Blog Postings
Finally Our Weblinks Collection is Updated
When KnowThis.com first launched in 1998 it was, at its core, a directory site. During these early days of the Internet directory websites were quite common. Made popular by Yahoo, directory sites contained a collection of links to other sites that, in most cases, were located, critically reviewed, and categorized by someone who had expertise in evaluating such sites. Directory sites were popular with Internet novices, who at that point in time represented quite a large percentage of Internet users. Since most novice users were stepping into unfamiliar territory and did not understand how to effectively search the web, directory sites were among the most visited sites during the 1990s.
Of course, this was before the introduction of intelligent search engines that scour the web for information using software robots instead of humans. But back in the 1990s, humans did most of the heavy lifting when it came to locating information. This included KnowThis.com, which was specifically created for the purpose of offering links to marketing sites. As we mention on our About page: “In November of 1997 a conversation between a university marketing professor and a university business librarian brought to light the lack of a centralized Internet resource dedicated to the field of marketing. This conversation was the starting point for building an online directory of marketing resources.”
We accomplished this by developing a site with hundreds of categorized links (see our Site History page for images). This was our bread-and-butter from 1998 until 2004 when we expanded into new areas such as offering tutorials, marketing stories and blog postings. Unfortunately, we have been so busy with these other areas that our Weblinks Collection has been neglected for much longer than we would like to admit (think years). So today, we are pleased to announce that our Weblinks Collection has once again been updated. We have trimmed a large number of dead links while fixing those that were giving errors but are still alive. As of today our Weblinks Collection contains over 800 links. Over the next few weeks we expect to enhance the Weblinks Collection as we have stored a large number of quality sites that are not currently included.
To go along with the Weblinks Collection update, we have also updated our unique search function enabling users to only search those sites found in our special Weblinks Collection. In this way, a search is targeted to sites that, for the most part, are marketing specific or at least have a decent chance of offering marketing information.