My Internet Marketing Predictions for 2010

I've seen several interesting posts prediction big trends for Internet Marketing in 2010. As unpredictable as the web is, I figured it couldn't hurt to throw my hat in the ring as well. I tried to predict things that I had not seen in other posts just to keep things interesting. Too bad I'll have to wait a year to see how this all plays out. Here goes.

The Rise of Recommendation Engines

Currently most of the content we are presented with is the result of some overt action. We follow people, subscribe to feeds, and we enter search queries. As the web evolves over the next year I think the standard will be higher. Instead of requiring me to constantly input data to get what I want, the web will start to bring it to me. There are a few examples of this already. The best example of this that I know of is Pandora. I give a few basic parameters and it starts returning results it thinks I will like. A lot of the time they are correct. Google Reader is also beginning to dabble in this area. Over the next year we will see more recommendation engines and increased accuracy of the existing ones. This will be the beginning of the transition from active to passive information acquisition.

Drupal Pushes RDF Over The Tipping Point

The web would be a much different place if everyone all of a sudden decided to properly mark up their web pages. Amazing applications could be developed querying large cross sections of websites and aggregating the data. Duplication would be reduced significantly. Instead of seeing 50 pages on the net for Linda's Flower Shop, websites could simply query the basic location and company data, and mix it with their own unique. A more efficient, and dynamic Internet. The problem is that manually creating web pages with RDF markup isn't very realistic. The average webmaster barely knows what RDF is. Drupal 7 could change this. Drupal organizes much of it's content into fields right out of the box. Drupal 7 will allow webmasters to automatically add RDF markup to fields and associate certain fields with vocabularies. This simplification could be the tipping point for more structured data on the web. Drupal users will do what they have always done, but will also be adding rich semantic markup to their content. The more semantic markup there is, the greater the incentive to develop applications to make use of it.

Google Starts To Dominate The Social Media Landscape

It has really baffled me at how slowly and awkwardly Google is moving into the social media space. They have all of that user information, the ad delivery system, and a suite of peripheral social services. What the hell are they waiting for? My guess is that the wait will soon be over. Google is not going to try to rival Twitter or FB. They are going to approach this how they approach everything else. Aggregation. They have a distinct advantage over the existing networks in that they can aggregate many types of information. News, Maps, Content, Images etc... Twitter and FB cannot. Google will seek to become a sort of uber stream of social activity.