The future of the Corporate Website: irrelevance, evolution or extinction?

Anyone who regularly reads this blog will know that I've spent some time contemplating the corporate website: what defines it, and what makes a good one. And, in common with a number of other bloggers and/or web commentators, I've also been musing on the question of where the corporate website is going.

To provide some background, a lot of the speculation – for me at least – started with Jeremiah Owyang’s assertion that the corporate website (in its current form at least) was soon to become an outdated, irrelevant dinosaur. Or something like that. He makes a very convincing argument that the corporate website simply cannot remain in its current form in the face of the growth of social media, social networks, consumer rating sites and blogs which give the online community the ability to feedback to itself clearly and honestly and accurately (read the post.)

The post created a LOT of dialogue and a lot of feedback, but one of the most interesting responses was Mark Cahill’s post which expanded on real-world ways to provide relevance to the corporate website. Read the post, it’s the most definitive comment I've seen on the development of the corporate website. He gives eight specific ways in which the corporate website can retain its relevance going forward, in the climate of social media and so on.