Online advertising, again, equals data

"Someone will successfully fuse social networking and online advertising. If I am interested in some topic, like programming in Ruby, or Vespa scooters (along with thousands of like-minded others), then sponsoring an online watering hole for aficionados should make sense. But no one has cracked the code yet, except for the mega-sites like MySpace and Yahoo. This should be the area that traditional media companies would move into, if they had any sense."

- Stowe Boyd, Jan, 2, 2007

Right on. Once the goals of online advertising are seen as being primarily data-driven (and less about brand or even direct response), as many have written, than this vision will become a reality.

I don't think its an easy code to crack necessarily(because of the data repository and analysis needs -- think of the cycles to be spent finding Vespa interest data points and correlating them with advertiser messages), but it will happen in 2007.