The current standard business model for job boards involves persuading fresh traffic to give the rights to personal information to a third party that then resells it. There is some reason to question the ability of this arrangement to endure over the next five years. As personal privacy concerns become more commonplace and better understood, the importance of the Job Board Brand as a certificate of trust will dominate investment patterns in the industry. The number of results per advertising dollar expended to acquire traffic will decline significantly across the industry with improvements above a low mean available only to trusted brands.

Inbound structural hyperlinks are those links on other websites that 'point' to 'your' website. As the web becomes increasingly oriented towards reputation and referral, the degree to which these inbound links are surrounded by positive text will be the determining and measurable factor in the value of a web brand. Today, inbound links are best understood as the reliable foundation of all other traffic to a website.

Google's recent acquisition of the Pyra Labs, creator of some of the earliest technology for creating weblogs, is a solid indicator that reputation as a factor in the measurement of 'page importance' is a dynamic that the search engine company wishes to promote, monitor, and control. Google's ambition in this regard is significantly larger than the vision that powered the initial Web infrastructure companies (like Netscape and  Microsoft). 

Through thorough search and research, Google was able to forecast and now, post acquisition, cause the shift towards structural links as the most important source of traffic. A quick search of the various blog infrastructure companies will demonstrate a radical shift towards the automation of these links (blogrolling). Ultimately, traffic will be 'earned' by reputation in a process that rewards companies for teaching their users to become more effective with Web technology. Interestingly, the net effect and cause of this dynamic will be an ever-accelerating production of web content. 

(more tomorrow)