I was talking this morning to an entrepreneur about the new internet, web 2.0, and network trends specifically how online advertising is changing.  Ironically, SiliconAngle contributor Alex Calic posted a “deep angle” on this very topic on how data is changing advertising on the web.

Then I saw a tweet from Louis Gray who pointed to @skepticgeek who’s name is Mahendra Palsule.   Mahendra had a great post on how the new web 2.0 network is evolving and provided a table to show the changes.  He talks about relevance in context to some of the key trends today and has good links to other sources.

There is a deeper angle. One that disrupts both the consumer and business markets.  The notion of the Internet has changed up and down the stack from the networks to the applications.

Mahedra’s post teases out some of the web 2.0 angles.  It’s a big deal if you take further to include more real world examples such as networking, cloud, and mobile.

Social media and Businesses on the web today are driven by the numbers game – of traffic, page views, and follower numbers. But the trend I foresee is:

The web is evolving from a numbers model to a relevance model.

Numbers Model	Relevance Model
# of Followers	Context-driven Lists
# of Clicks	# of Interactions
# of Page Views	# of Returning Visitors
# of Ads Displayed	Time spent on site
# of Ads Clicked	# of Subscriptions Gained
Obnoxious Ads	Relevant Ads
Influence Management	Dynamic Social Graph
Sharing Orgy & Noise	Curation
Information Overload	Filtered, Relevant Information
Traffic Economy	Attention Economy
SEO and SMO	Personalization

The above table lists different attributes of this paradigm shift. The “Influence Management” entry links to a post by Mia Dand who describes how leveraging social media is often about using a handful of influencers (read: with large follower numbers) to spread your message. Contrast that with Dynamic Social Graphs as described by Robert Scoble, where influence is dynamically determined based on relevance and not just numbers.

Users Are The Biggest Actor In Online Advertising

What is really going on here is that there are new factors shaping how people behave and react online.  This new behavior is happening in real time and the end user (consumer) is the biggest most central actor in the advertising equation.  This user data is very important for shaping new solutions being developed by startups.

In the past users were passive and mostly unknown.  We all know the old saying “50% of advertising is wasted they just don’t know which half it is”.  Now with the new web everyone is connected and measurable.  This is changing everything and new metrics will emerge.

Disruptive Trends – Mobile and Cloud

Two of the biggest trends driving this change is mobile and cloud.  I’ve posted about this in the past as it relates to mobile.  I called it the Mobile Innovation Cycle.

As we’ve been saying at SiliconAngle for over a year now, data is becoming the most important thing for developers and now for advertisers especially in mobile. Data drives a better user experience and a better user experience drive monetization. Data and data analysis is at the heart of this value proposition.

Look at the search industry in say Google. Having access to data enabled Google to build a quality search product and ad network.  With Google constantly iterating their data quality they were able to consistently build better algorithms to present users with a compelling search product.

In mobile and smartphones search doesn’t really work like on the wbe due to the screen size and real time nature of mobility. So display advertising hold the best seat at the table with respect to the search opportunity on mobile.  The display ad and applications will be the vehicle where innovation (e.g. like search in late 90s) around consumer experience will occur.

The result for consumers will look like some automated cloud service that will do most of the work and then just show up in the display of the smartphone. With the creation of the iPhone the industry is seeing massive change.  A paradigm that I haven’t seen since the disruption of the browser.  I expect to see some major game changing user experiences over the next 10 years.  I call it the mobile innovation cycle – enabled by Apple’s iPhone a few years ago.

My analogy:  What the iPhone will do for mobile today is what the original Macintosh did for computing back in 1984- change the game in terms of user expectations around the required experience.

On cloud the Pradeep Sindhu, Founder of Juniper Networks, said it best in my interview with him in Barcelona Spain at the Mobile World Congress. Cloud computing is an echo from the change that happened in the network from circuit switching to packet switching. It’s effectively the largest re-architecting of the information infrastructure since the birth of computing.

If you look at the fundamental reasons why cloud is happening it boils down to a few things. First, is the economics specifically the cap-x and op-x of information infrastructure networking being defined as networking, computing, and storage all inclusive.

Cap-x actually has dropped exponentially. Cap-x per unit capability has been dropping for the past few decades. Conversely, Op-x in fact has been rising. Because Cap-x has fell down, the infrastructure has become more physically distributed.

Essentially cloud is an attempt to re-centralize the heavy part of computing and storage. It is enabled by the network being “good enough”. So cloud could not be viable 10 years ago because the network wasn’t good enough.

First reason is economics, second reason is that technology of networking is a good enabler, and third reason is the desirers of end users. What end users want is access to information anytime anywhere.

The cloud based model allows them (end users) to do that (get information) more effectively rather than information being stored at end points.