The coming automatic, freaky, contextual world and why we’re writing a book about it. First, the short version of today’s news. Shel Israel and I are collaborating on a book, titled, The Age of Context: How it Will Change Your Life and Work. The long version: A new world is coming. It’s scary. Freaky. First, the trends. 1. More on these trends later in this post. This new, automatic world, is already coming. We’ve also seen several other examples that are coming over the next few weeks. Add to that new kinds of software developer kits coming from major companies like Qualcomm (AKA Gimbal), which will gather this new kind of contextual data together, send it off to cloud servers, where developers can build new kinds of apps that will, in real time, hook up to all sorts of databases about us and the businesses we buy from or work for, and bring us back interesting smart alerts and more.
Our announcement this morning: The Age of Context: How it Will Change Your Life and Work Shel and I are both seeing the same thing from different points of view. How will the book be funded? 1. The Future of Inbound: Shel Israel Looks Ahead to the 'Age of Context' Shel Israel writes The Social Beat blog column at Forbes.com and has authored four books about digital media's impact on business. He's now working on his fifth book, The Age of Context: How it Will Change Your Work and Life with Robert Scoble, due to be published in October. I got a chance to catch up with Israel to talk about the latest trends in marketing: context, personalization, and the debate over tracking cookies . Here's what he said. Q. Can you tell us a bit about your upcoming book, The Age of Context ? A. The book has more than 100 examples, even though we are only at the dawn of this new age. We write about how retailers will use sensors and data to offer real-time rewards when a shopper touches an item, and talk about a new personalized guide that will select programs, movies, and sports events based on your preference and the channels in your cable plan.
Q. A. The advertising is most often irrelevant to our interests, and it makes sense why people vilify cookies today. Q. Welcome to Web 3.0, The Contextual Web. “The Attention Internet” we’ve lived in for the past decade has been all about the business of amassing eyeballs at content sites, either through massive scale—Yahoo, AOL/Huffington Post, You Tube—or by providing search for content---Google, Bing, Ask.
The way you made a lot of money was to engage a lot of eyeballs. The Attention Internet has been about getting us to go somewhere on the Internet and pay attention on a mass scale. Evidence: have a look at the top 10 brands online in 2011, according to Neilsen: Rank Web Brand Unique Visitors (000) month 1 Google 153,441 2 Facebook 137,644 3 Yahoo! 4 MSN/Bing 106,692 5 YouTube 106,692 6 Microsoft 83,691 7 AOL Network 74,633 8 Wikipedia 62,097 9 Apple 61,608 10 Ask Network 60,552 (source: Neilsen Wire 12/28/11) Facebook, Microsoft and Apple are the only ones that don’t clearly fit into either content or search for content category.
The lesson we each wished we knew back in 2002 was “it’s all about the eyeballs.” Data, data, data. The data is there.