the reflexions insider

When it comes to fragmentation of audiences, markets, and media, the trend line is clear: we are collectively becoming not a single audience of billions but a million audiences of thousands, hundreds, or even one.

It’s a fascinating long term side-effect of media decentralization that’s been predicted for decades by media visionaries like Marshall McLuhan (pictured right) and, dare I say, Andy Warhol. The one-to-many paradigm of network television and weekly newsmagazines understandably has a homogenizing effect, both in reinforcing a common identity and in shaping public opinion. The many-to-many model of social media and its various manifestations (blogs, wikis, social bookmarks) has been turning this model upside-down.

Of course marketers have been using this to their advantage for years, from the highly targeted narrowcasting as seen in political campaigns to highly personalized direct mail. But the social web is both responding to and further cultivating this fragmentation.

Social platforms like Ning have emerged to provide ad hoc and on-demand networks meant to service everything from 5-person knitting clubs to Jay Z’s millions of fans. The single-network solutions like MySpace and Facebook have been incredibly powerful in generating public awareness of social networks. But they have discovered that the users of today’s web are a fickle bunch, [...]

At sometime just before 12PM EDT the Amazon Simple Storage Service (or “S3″ for short) began to fail, causing major disruptions among applications that rely on the service for cheap and virtually unlimited storage. Amazon’s string of status updates throughout the day barely masks the complete-meltdown nature of the incident. Five hours later the service was restored.

For the uninitiated, S3 is a central part of Amazon’s family of service-based solutions and has been regarded as one of the most useful and reliable of the bunch. In short: it means that developers can offload storage of large or oft-requested files to a trusted third party without having to worry about costly bandwidth, hardware, and sys admins, and far more cheaply than content delivery networks (”CDN’s”) like Akamai. While Amazon charges based on usage of the service, stories abound with companies that save hundreds or thousands of dollars a month by shifting storage to S3.

Analysts have largely responded positively to the service, which originally grew out of Amazon’s internal infrastructure efforts and has come to symbolize the company as a major player in the emerging software-as-a-service landscape of so-called “utility computing.”

What’s noteworthy about this event is twofold: 1) the [...]

In the ever-shifting landscape of internet titans, the Microsoft/Yahoo! power struggle is looking more like a teenage soap opera, albeit one with billions of dollars and control of the #2 internet search position in play. But what’s more, the side effects of the struggle are starting to point to a power play for dominance of the burgeoning world of the semantic web.

Besides the posturing and very public nature of both companies’ actions, what’s most interesting — and sometimes most telling — are the investments, partnerships, and acquisitions that have been unfolding since the saga began.

One of the more recent moves was Microsoft’s acquisition of the semantic search firm Powerset, itself coming on the heels of Yahoo!’s recent announcement of its open search platform, providing some support for semantic data to third party developers.

The Powerset acquisition is more than bet-hedging against losing out on its bid for Yahoo!. What Microsoft has started to understand is that the next killer app of the web will be found in the nascent semantic technologies and standards that are only starting to take shape.

Companies large and small are starting to invest big money in semantic web research and development. But if Microsoft can spend big money buying their way [...]