A couple of interesting posts alert me to the fact that conservatism is still rife in Europe regarding business investing and the entrepreneurial spirit. And this is not a great environment for the budding web entrepreneur. Personally, I wouldn’t want to be starting a web venture now unless I had a good understanding of the semantic web and its implications, especially if I were to be raising funds from VCs who all dream and pursue the big exit, but which in my view is now too difficult to realize as all absorbable ‘global scale’ pure-play web ideas have been executed in terms of Web 2.0 technologies. Moreover, from my point-of-view the semantic web is more an evolution than a revolution in that it will enable the old to perform better, rather than the new to replace the old, and that will present challenges for VCs and Corporate acquirers - how to improve the current portfolio rather than purely look for new opportunities. Thus, the new value-building will come from the integration and consolidation of the old rather than the raw pursuit of new services and ideas that enlivened the 2003-2007 web sphere. In view of this, my predictions for the web 2008-2011 are as follows:

- the overriding objectives of viable new web ventures will be structure, attribution, relevancy, knowledge, integration and consolidation. The old notions have been community, collaboration, ranking, media and sharing.

- websites will consolidate and become more transparent due to data being better labelled. Thus presentation and usability will improve and functions will be more effective. For example, many sites in India share the same themes and goals. These could consolidate and webmasters will yearn for more information about their users’ aims and desires to fulfill that goal.

- micropayments will be introduced and music will improve. Today’s music is generally poor because of not only a cultural thrust toward eye and ear candy, but also because the lack of capacity for labels to nuture a great many artists as was seen in the past. With the latter, I predict ultimately that a more meritocratic reality will ensue with the freer sharing of music with fairer and more transparent remuneration for artists. Thus content attibution will become more important so that funds reach the right sets of people. I have laid out my vision here.

- business directory services will consolidate. The many yellow and white page type directories worldwide will be ‘mashed up’ and consolidated and it will be very comprehensive.

- information quality will improve. While fee-based business intelligence services and research databases will still exist, the quality of publicly available information will start to rise dramatically. As such, transparency will become more expected. However, insider-type knowledge and insight will still be prized.

- alliances and shared-visions will have more value. At the same time, brand and network building will become somewhat easier as a result of internet memes.

- data will become more open and available. Just as software code has become more available, accessible, low-cost and open, so too will become data and content. Success will come from providing certain experiences to certain networks.