Now, what prompted this entry was not so much wanting to note the authorities service as it was coming across the following use of the term webification. This is from a discussion of what is motivating recent acquisitions by Google and Microsoft in the online advertizing arena.
What they’re really trying to buy into is the webification of advertising. The same way that the internal combustion engine took the horseless carriage and turned it into something no one had ever anticipated, the Web is turning advertising into something we could never previously have imagined. Before the Web came along, advertising was a totally disconnected activity. Advertisers never had any certainty that their ads would be seen by any of their prospective customers, and even if they were, it was virtually impossible to assess how effectively they grabbed their attention.
This is the webification of advertising, taking advantage of the connected fabric of the Web, and it depends for its success on other fundamental characteristics of the Web, such as network effects. The ability to tailor messages and to track and interpret responses depends on having large databanks of past behavior by similar prospects in similar contexts. Scale is a huge determinant of success, and therefore the would-be players are eagerly buying up scale. [» The webification of advertising | Software as services | ZDNet.com]
