John Battelle on 2004

Several people have been posting their thoughts on 2004, and it all started with Jeremy Zawodny’s thoughts on 2004. Jeremy says that Google’s PageRank is dead, and I can see his point, even though I do believe that there might be some other solutions. The problem with PageRank is that spammers can get their pages high up in rank by putting valid links on lots of pages, which they could even own. This does not mean that PageRank is dead, but simply means that they need some kind of system to find out real links and artificial links (meaning put there not for content or value but for pagerank). This will be very hard, but probably not a lot harder than some other methods. Search is hotting up though.

The biggest thing that will happen is something where I agree with John Battelle. In his predictions he says that the Internet will become a Platform and while this has been said often, same as John, I believe that this is now finally the time for this to happen. With all the APIs that are already out there and with RSS (which is where content syndication will be easier as Jeremy noted) and the general coming off age of XML, we are moving into a world where things can interact and you can build new things by linking old things.

Check out John’s post for other interesting predictions.