As the title says I have been tagged by Dave Winer.

The rules say I now have to tell you 5 things you didn’t know about me and then tag five others.

So, here goes:

1. I am currently in St James, Cape Town, S Africa. It is a small area between Muizenberg and Fish Hoek (see map).

2. I own a home here – on Jacobs ladder.

3. My wife is South African – Gené McPherson. Born in Jo’burg. Her parents and one of her sisters live in Cape Town today. Gené was a co-founder of Cyberia [free subscription needed] (the worlds first Internet Café – London 1994. She was also VP Marketing at RealNames. She is now a Mom – and a great one.

4. We have a new son – born 4 November. Luke Graham Teare. This is the first time his grandparents have seen him and he them. Then again, it is pretty much the first time he has seen anything .

5. I am the oldest son of 5 brothers and a sister. Two of my brothers died (one an his first year and one at 37). So there are 3 brothers and a sister remaining. My Mom is still alive  and living in Scarborough, North Yorkshire. She is 72 and I am 52. My brother Brian is CTO at cscape.com, which I started in 1983.

I am tagging Ivan Pope; Gabe Rivera; Auren Hoffman; Michael Tanne and Richard MacManus

In response to the current discussion on Techmeme and TailRank hipmojo writes that the Pareto principle is in play on the internet and that no matter how much we want it to be otherwise 80% of online advertising will go to 20% of the web sites.

When the dust settles, the top 20% of websites will get 80% of ad revenues. It’s that simple. Portals might change in shape, form or nature, but whatever they represent loosely will still get the bulk of revenues and traffic.

With respect, that is nonsense. Since the advent of Google Adsense the shape of internet advertising spend has mirrored the flattening of traffic I speak of on the edgeio blog. Almost half of Google’s revenue comes from Adsense. And about 75% of the dollars earned through Adsense stay with the publishers whose sites the ads run on. Clearly the lions share of the money spent through Google is shared about 50-50 with the publishers in the “foothills”.

It may be worth listening to the Google Earnings calls on Earningscast to validate this.

That is why Google talks so much about “inventory”. That is, traffic from outside google.com. The size and cost of this inventory is a major variable and the need to grow it helps us to understand deals like the one with YouTube.

If you roll the clock back to the pre-Adsense days when DoubleClick ruled, and online advertising was only going to large sites, it is a huge change in monetization and traffic flows. Give Google credit for this.

One of the things my piece argues is that there is a new trend on top of this established one – publisher monetization of their own content through direct relationships to advertisers (job boards, sponsorships and Techmeme like ad units being examples).

Sure the portals are still big but the collective foothills are as big now, and will be a lot bigger in the future.

Last week Fred Wilson did a post on a phenomena he called de-portalization. I think he is right on the money.

I just posted a piece on the edgeio blog that picks up on that theme and discusses the consequences of the trend.

The top 10 consequences are:

1. The revenue growth that has characterized the Internet since 1994 will continue. But more and more of the revenue will be made in the foothills, not the mountains.
2. If the major destination sites want to participate in it they will need to find a way to be involved in the traffic that inhabits the foothills.
3. Widgets are a symptom of this need to embed yourself in the distributed traffic of the foothills.
4. Portals that try to widgetize the foothills will do less well than those who truly embrace distributed content, but better than those who ignore the trends.
5. Every pair of eyeballs in the foothills will have many competing advertisers looking to connect with them. Publishers will benefit from this.
6. Because of this competition the dollar value of the traffic that is in the foothills will be (already is) vastly more than a generic ad platform like Google Adsense or Yahoo’s Panama can realize. Techcrunch ($180,000 last month according to the SF Chronicle) is an example of how much more money a publisher who sells advertising and listings to target advertisers can make than when in the hands of an advertiser focused middleman like Google.
7. Publisher driven revenue models will increasingly replace middlemen. There will be no successful advertiser driven models in the foothills, only publisher centric models. Successful platform vendors will put the publisher at the center of the world in a sellers market for eyeballs. There will be more publishers able to make $180,000 a month.
8. Portals will need to evolve into platform companies in order to participate in a huge growth of Internet revenues. Service to publishers will be a huge part of this. Otherwise they will end up like Infospace, or maybe Infoseek. Relics of the past.
9. Search however will become more important as content becomes more distributed. Yet it will command less and less a proportion of the growing Internet traffic.
10. Smart companies will (a) help content find traffic by enabling its distribution. (b) help users find content that is widely dispersed by providing great search. (c) help the publishers in the rising foothills maximize the value of their publications.

Discussion

Kevin Burton Techmeme Mike Arrington Syntagma Dan Farber at ZDNet Mark Evans Fred Wilson Ivan Pope at Snipperoo Tech Tailrank Collaborative Thinking David Black Surfing the Chaos Ben Griffiths Dave Winer (great pics) Kosso’s Braingarden Dizzy Thinks Mark Evans

Over at the edgeio blog I have posted the first insight into where we are going with edgeio search. It has been about 9 months since we launched edgeio.

We now have a dedicated search team and this is their first push. It is not yet perfect but it is a vast improvement on what was there before (also significantly better than Googlebase search – which is a primary comparison for us).

As the post says we have decided to go with the flow to some extent. Many listings based sites are uploading their listings to edgeio and we are providing search traffic back to them. We are being used as a listings search service by companies with listings and by users looking for listings. A “search engine for stuff” if you will.

Based on our experience there seems to be demand for a search engine that indexes actual items/services/offers/wants/needs. edgeio wants to become that. Try a google search for “Sony Vaio” and compare it to an edgeio search. We show “stuff” (Sony Vaio’s actually) and they show sites about stuff, but no “stuff”. That’s the opening we see. Clearly Googlebase is focused there also, but it is clear that the complexities of owning google.com and its algorithm clash with the need for Googlebase to have its data seen. edgeio actually does better on Google than Googlebase (see examples below).

Let me know what you think. Our first search algorithm is live on edgeio.com now. We have a lot more to do (we know) but its a good first step.

PS

Oh and as promised here are some examples of edgeio’s Google performance. Basically, a secondary effect of the way edgeio is being used is that we have improved rank on google.com for searches that we have lots of listings for. The effect of this is that our listing partners get more traffic. As our listings grow, from thousands of publishers (currently about 6000) that trend should continue.

Here are some Google searches to show that:

• 2001 Autos
• 2002 Autos
• 2003 Autos
• 2004 Autos
• 94301
• 94025
• Resale Homes By Owner
• Upper East Side Condo
• Upper West Side Condo
• Lobbyist Jobs
• Babysitter Silverthorne