The Database Of Intentions Part II

John Battelle updates his seminal idea - The Database of Intentions: "Search was a pristine signal, an eruption of oxygen in the anoxic ocean of the early web, and an entire ecosystem grew in its bloom. The first implication was already manifest: Google had launched AdWords and AdSense, Overture (later to become Yahoo Search Marketing) was thriving, and a burgeoning paid search ecosystem was in the early stages of becoming a multi-billion commercial expression of the Database of Intention's power.  But as anyone who's been reading this site already knows, web search as a pure signal has been attenuating of late - overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of data on the web, for one, and secondly by our own increasingly complicated expectations.  Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does the Internet. In the past year I've come to the conclusion that "web search" was just the first of many fields in the Database of Intentions. For those of you who are not database geeks, and to further pad the metaphor, a field in a database is colloquially defined as a specific type of information in that database. Sets of fields are called records, and sets of records make up the database.  My mistake in 2003 was to assume that the entire Database of Intentions was created through our interactions with traditional web search. I no longer believe this to be true. In the past five or so years, we've seen "eruptions" of entirely new fields, each of which, I believe, represent equally powerful signals - oxygen flows around which massive ecosystems are already developing. In fact, the interplay of all of these signals (plus future ones) represents no less than the sum of our economic and cultural potential."