As a new venue for business, the Internet has inspired many new trends for advertising and marketing. One of these is called article marketing.

Article marketing predates the Internet, as it has long been a part of print publishing, and it has affected the Internet in equally dramatic ways. Articles not only provide information, they allow website owners to promote their sites, products and services, while hopefully providing useful content. In exchange for these benefits, the author is allowed a short blurb at the end of his article, variously called a "bio box" a " byline" or a "resource box."

Generally speaking, the more articles one puts into the directories, the better will be his or her site search results. this can result in better sales due to the increased number of article views by consumers. A site with good and reliable content may also be able to look forward to support from advertisers who want to take advantage of the site's traffic.

Mac users have a number of tools at their disposal for the writing of articles. iWork contains Pages, an intuitive, well thought out word processor with many excellent features. In addition, every Mac comes with TextEdit, a bare bones but adequate text editor for article writers. In addition, the Mac provides a number of useful services such as an integrated dictionary, thesaurus, spell checker and other useful tools.

Unfortunately, the success of article marketing has also led to some excesses. Many webmasters are posting poor quality articles. Some contain grammatical or spelling mistakes. Some contain "spun" material, that is, a previous article that was processed through a piece of software that rearranges the words and paragraphs to make it appear to search engines to be a new article. These do not usually fool human readers, however, and they are generally allowed only into the poorer quality article directories.

The large amount of poor quality articles, far from giving fresh information to consumers and researchers, have had a negative effect of squeezing out the quality from the total number of articles posted. But search engines do their best to give the poor quality content a low ranking. It's been much like a cat and mouse game between some article marketers and search engines like Google.

The great wealth of content now available to Internet users has made research on virtually every topic easy. However, there are so many sources on the Internet whose content is of dubious value that Internet researchers are often cautioned to base their research only on websites maintained by trusted organizations such as universities and government agencies.

Article marketing as indeed change the face of the Internet. The only question is, is it for better or worse? Only time will tell.