Towards the end of March 2007, the "web 2.0 is dead" meme was going around. The basic idea here is that a phase of Internet innovation has ended, and that the next round of innovation will be characterized by something more challenging: something that involves deepening the "web as platform" concept by creating greater interoperability and transforming web sites into web services.

The two links that got a lot of attention on this meme were this article by Peter Rip of Crosslink Capital and this one by Alex Iskold of Read/Write Web.

I agree with their idea; we have reached a conclusion of sorts. To put it in simple terms, I think we've crossed the point of no return regarding social media: the socialization of the web is here, and it's only going to accelerate.

To understand where we are going, it's useful to look at a map. And for the Internet entrepreneur, the attention economy is the map of the journey. John Hagel's thesis regarding three types of companies -- infrastructure, product creation, and customer relations -- is, in my opinion, at the heart of the map of the attention economy. The image below illustrates.


In light of the map, where do we go now?

We go where the opportunity is.

The next phase in web innovation will involve fleshing out the middle link of the attention map, the product creators who reconstruct data. My favorite example of this is outside.in: they take data sources from around the web and reclassify them according to geographic metadata. In doing so, they help create greater efficiencies in the attention economy. They currently seem to be vying for a consumer-facing strategy (i.e. interact directly with the customer), but when they start feeding the edge (which they are already doing a bit of via RSS), this may change, and they may find themselves to be a more natural fit as a product creator that adds value by delivering products/services that can enable consumer-facing businesses to allocate the attention of their users.

Let me make it more clear: the next phase is about using reconstruction to make the attention economy more efficient. A more intuitive way of saying this would be that we'll see the rise of the portal maker: companies that specialize in reconstructing data to create portals that can be used to efficiently allocate attention within certain niches.

You could say it's about inverting the universe.

From Link Baiter to Bait Taker

Search marketers are familiar with the concept of "link bait" -- a marketing strategy whereby you try to get links by putting something out there that "baits" other publishers. This can be something like a great resource article (i.e. a guide to linkbaiting) or false sensationalism (i.e. as we saw with media coverage of the Virginia Tech murders) or, my personal favorite, something so important it could literally save the world (i.e. 9/11 truth). Link baiting is a hugely important concept, and those who do it well are destined for online success. But in a world where everyone's link baiting, a new scarcity emerges: that of being the bait taker, of reconstructing all the bait that people are putting out there.

Digg is an example of a bait taker; a search marketer's wet dream is to get on the front page of digg, so that they can get a high-powered link that naturally generates a viral linking pattern (we talked a bit about the importance of viral linking patterns in our article on mockingbird marketing). And sure enough, we're seeing a rise of niche versions of Digg.

For the product creators -- "the bait takers" -- the game will first be about gaining the ability to reconstruct syndication so that an output that yields greater efficiencies in the attention economy is created. Once this is done, though, the game will be about building and governing communities.

Who's best suited to build and govern communities?

The blogger. Our hero.

Readers of this blog are by now familiar with the myth of the ActoNetwork: That bloggers who dare to fulfill the prophecy will go on to create these niche portals/communities, and these heroic blogging bait takers will unite their communities to create the virtual corporation that ends up creating a new world order that uses the power of truth and knowledge to liberate mankind. That is, of course, the myth that I, Kid Mercury, the messenger, am here to deliver.

And so the next phase in web innovation is to make the myth real. As for me, part of the strategy I'm working on is to develop the content management system that bloggers will need to create profitable communities. The goal is to automate the creation of custom communities like ActoGuitar, Acto911, ActoCIA, ActoDental, ActoElection, InformedForex, and ActoAstrology (like you fill out a form and you get a community....eventually it will be a full blown social network). I don't have the process fully automated yet, and not every detail is as perfect as I'd like it to be. But it's time to accelerate the pace a bit, which I'll be doing with the next few communities I create.