Your web, post-Amazon

Last time I looked ahead to a world where global players like Amazon overstep their role in the market, and a forced to take a back-seat.

Today I’m looking at what will fill this vacuum, and how you can get position yourself now to be able to take your fair share when it happens. In essence this boils down to two key concepts: ‘own your data’ and ‘structure your data’.

Owning your data means keeping control over it. Don’t simply post it to content aggregators like Facebook or Twitter, where it is easy to add the information, but hard or impossible to move it to another platform. (But it’s okay to use them to point people to your content).

Keeping control means you should own the website where the content is delivered: that way you will not be beholden to others who might decide to switch you off. Luckily self-hosting is easy to do these days, as the cost of hardware reduces you can lease a dedicated server for $100 a month, and there are even cheaper methods if you host from your own office.

“Structuring your data” is all about making is usable, both now, and in the future. If you structure it properly – using forms and a database to store the information, splitting it down into different fields, then you will be able to present the information in lots of different ways, including ways that haven’t even been thought of yet. But if you just throw the pages together at the beginning, they may look great now, but later on you will have a terrible time restructuring it.

So, if you’ve prepared for the post-Amazon era by taking ownership of your data, and structuring it sensibly, what can you expect? More players will enter the market to search through the structure of your data to make it available and usable in different forms. So if you are selling products, you might find your items listed in lots of places, with innovative ways emerging for the user-generated content (comments, ratings, companion-product preferences etc) to exist outside of the walled-garden of a single vendor. Naturally we’re unlikely to have heard the last of the present giants: I’d imagine both Google and Amazon will evolve into this aggregating role, along with players who currently seem to be in a totally different place: for example hardware companies like HTC, and hybrid hardware/content companies like Sony.