From quiet beginnings, Google Adsense has developed into a great tool that benefits advertisers and webmasters alike - not to mention Google itself. But beyond its phenomenal growth comes something that could be more far-reaching. Adsense has spawned a whole new online culture and given new meanings to concepts that have been around on the net for years.

I can remember in 1988, when I was developing Health News NZ out of a long-term interest in natural health remedies, reading tutorial articles by Ken Evoy on the importance of creating "content-rich" sites to draw in potential customers. There could be no argument with his thesis that the material in these sites would establish a relationship with visitors, and put them in the frame of mind to buy. It was all about building trust and good relations.

I didn't have products to sell, but Ken's argument had a ring of truth that has stayed with me ever since - and it has proved to be prophetic. At the time, I realised I was creating a "content-rich site" of exactly the kind Ken had in mind, and though my motives were simply to disseminate information, I felt kind of glad that I was on the right track.

Hundreds of other people were quietly doing the same - bringing their passions online, putting up information about whatever they loved to do, to the point where you can now type almost any word into a search engine and find that someone knowledgeable has spent many hours creating an online showcase to explain their "take" on the subject. Most of these sites came from pure love, and they are a tribute both to the Internet and the true passion of the human soul.

But thanks to Adsense, "content" has taken on a whole new meaning. Suddenly the possibility of earning a passive income from the Google phenomenon has caught on like wildfire among people interested mainly in dollars. These people are rushing to own content-rich niche sites - even if they know not one detail about those all-important "niches" that are now being identified as the latest in cash machines.

Make no mistake. We really are talking "quantity" rather than "quality" here. A sub-culture has sprung up almost from nowhere marketing ready-made sites and ready-made private label content to enable entrepreneurs to cash in big time on the best keywords in the new Google gravy train. People are falling over each other in droves to throw their money into the ring.

It's a developer's dream come true.

We now have software that will shell out a fully-fledged website in half an hour (and people expecting to bring online at least 5 of these a week), packages of ready-written Private Label Rights articles, membership sites where for a monthly fee you can get PLR packages on any topic that ranks high in keyword analyses, or ready-made content-rich sites already fitted out with Google Adsense codes. I recently visited a freelancing site where someone was looking to have content created at the rate of 40 short articles a day. HMMM...

To top it off, people are coming up with software that at the click of a button will personalise PLR articles so you don't get caught up in Google's "duplicate content" dredge.

Look around and you will find sites - some very substantial in terms of page numbers - that are nothing more than thinly disguised venues for the display of adverts. They have a "search" or "directory" flavour, and the content on each page is just enough to enable Google's wily spiders to figure out what ads they should send across the ether today. Where IS all this heading to?

Probably only time will tell, but it's interesting to speculate. After all, this is the Information Age - only who said it was going to be the Information Cloning Age? Perhaps the hope is that by the time someone strikes their fifth cloned site for the day, they will be so desperate for something innovative that they go into a frenzy of ad clicking - aah just what the site is there for!

Well, maybe the Internet is big enough to stand this onslaught; maybe we have so many billions of users hungry for information and finding it through so many different channels that the duplication will never be noticed.

I'd like to think, though, that discerning users (aren't we all discerning when it comes to things that waste our time?) will soon sort the wheat from the chaff and gravitate to sites that are genuinely content-rich in Ken Evoy's original sense. You can amplify and enrich individual content with feeds and judicial use of "Private Label Content" here and there. But nothing beats the special insights and experiences of a site owner whose involvement with the subject matter goes more than skin-deep.

Speaking personally, Google Adsense is a joy to anyone who has laboured long and hard on developing unique copy for a true information site. I am sure there are many like me who feel the same. It's wonderful to find a way of helping your readers that also brings in a return for the hours of work involved - but moneymaking is not, and never was, the main aim of the exercise.

I believe one of the most important keys to success on the net is still the personal touch. Visitors can soon smell out whether a site "comes from the heart" or not and I think in the fullness of time the use of genuine content will still be the key to building a clientele of lasting visitors.

Ken was right, of course - the true "Content" concept is still in the driving seat.