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Context is the new king

The first dot com bust aligns almost perfectly with the generally accepted inflection point between web 1.0 and web 2.0. Economic forces killed tired business models in favor of new and better ones. Well, here we are again. Economic forces are threatening to kill off many 2.0 businesses in favor of tech that improves productivity, not the ones working on luring eyeballs. Expect consumer innovation to slow as the available money shifts from the hands of advertisers to Enterprises hungry for productivity innovation.

Evidence that the party is coming to a close:

  • Yahoo! merger
  • Kleiner-Perkins announcing they won’t invest in 2.0 any longer
  • Failed economy pushing for tech that will maximize productivity

The rise of meta data and the birth of context

Web 1.0 connected people to content. Web 2.0 connected people to each other. Web 3.0 will push contextualized content to people. Some are calling it the semantic web. It has to do with distribution like RSS, SaaS, and APIs. Application architecture is overtaking the idea of a “page” as the basic building block of the web.

The economic impact of this is the loss in inventory as pages disappear in favor of applications, dashboards, and aggregators. The coming wave of Web 2.0 failures is due to their dependence on ad supported business models. Ad revenue models only makes sense if you can get people to spend time on your site. Unfortunately for 2.0 companies, decreased ad spending by businesses hurt by the economic downturn will accelerate the distribution of 3.0 technology. So now comes service based business models. Subscription models replace desktop EULAs and they are billed from API usage, SaaS subscription dues, and so forth.

What the world needs now is context

The logical next question is what services do people need? We don’t need help creating content. We don’t need help connecting with other people. In a word, we need help with context. More specifically, we need help with the following:

  • Data portability and system interoperability
  • Information overload
  • Identity and reputation management
  • Help spotting and acting on emergent value that comes from the network effect

The last bullet is a really hot space for innovation. Just today, Gil Yehuda wrote on the new ZD Net Forrester blog:

“Although Web 2.0 tools present information, their use becomes increasingly more interesting when we look at the network of people who generate and care about the information.”

Man, ain’t that the truth! The more people interact in a networked fashion, the more meta data that is available to help automate contextualization and spot emerging trends. We need that intelligence piped to users so they can quickly, and easily take action on it—preferably from a mobile device and with automated management. And, since we can’t remove people from the picture, we need etiquette built in. Someone is going to make a killing from an etiquette engine with a good API.

Services that provide and aid in the management of social intelligence will be of strong value to the Enterprises, which is who has the money to pay for said innovation. The tech developed during this period will eventually trickle down to SMBs and the rest of the market much in the same way mainframe tech from 20 years ago, like virtualization, is doing today.

Microposts

The Sarah Palin pity party

From The Sarah Palin pity party

“…let’s consider that there are any number of women who could have been John McCain’s running mate — from Olympia Snowe to Christine Todd Whitman to Kay Bailey Hutchison to Elizabeth Dole to Condoleezza Rice — who would not have provoked this reaction. Democrats might well have been repulsed and infuriated by these women’s policy positions. But we would not have been sitting around worrying about how scared they looked.”

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The social media land grab

“If you poke your head into the wondrous world that is modern marketing you might find people jockeying for prominent placement in a quickly-shaping landscape that has been transformed by the latest tools and possibilities that we lovingly dub web2.0. Indeed, the blood-stained comment trails on a number of blogs and wikis suggests that territory is up for grabs in the effort to define the very term that many have claimed as their job title and/or area of expertise. “Social media” has landed in the lap of the marketing industry like a complex, alien contraption dropped upon Earthlings struggling to make sense of its origins, ethics, capabilities, and meaning.”

Via Dogs and Birds Can Make Social Media (You Can, Too)

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It’s the context

In a 1994 article he wrote for Wired magazine, futurist Paul Saffo addresses the future of digital networks. He writes: “[An] avalanche of content … will make context the scarce resource. Consumers will pay serious money for anything that helps them sift and sort and gather the pearls that satisfy their fickle media hungers. The future belongs to neither the conduit or content players, but those who control the filtering, searching and sense-making tools we will rely on to navigate through the banal expanses of cyberspace.”

via

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In the future, everyone has a PR problem

Like it or not, we are all public figures now — famous, as the new cliché goes, for 15 people.
— Jason Tanz writes in “Internet Famous: Julia Allison and the Secrets of Self-Promotion

Found via Ethan’s Tumblr account, which I should just turn into my microposts.

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