Ads are the micropayment. For reasons that would be interesting to understand, the currency of web microcommerce has not become euros or dollars, but attention of the users. Mostly commercial content providers conspired with ad brokers, and later the vital infrastructure providers such as Google have become ad brokers themselves.

This is both good and bad. The good is that free, innovative services proliferate, the bad is that most of the action takes place under the glowing sun of attention catchers trying to provide you the latest commercial information (hmm… or should I just write “banners”?).

How analytics is related to this is obvious. Because the ads are presented in the context of other information, that other information can be analyzed to fit with the ad, so that the ad has at least some hope to be relevant to the viewer. Even better, the viewers are sometimes quite intimately “known” to the service, so that the ads can be personalized, making them even more relevant.

At its best, then, the commercial information becomes so relevant that it does not bother the user any more, but quite the contrary, the user wants to see it. The attentional price paid by the user, analogous to a micropayment, has become zero, or even negative. Getting into such a situation would require intense competition between service providers, users willing to expose their personal information, and advanced analytics. How far can we go in this direction? Or should we? I don’t know, but some of the current “Web 2.0″ sites are a good start.

Often it would be useful to draw pictures of these networks, to understand better what their structure is. However, with networks that have millions of nodes, this is in practice impossible.

The problem of visualizing large networks is a common one and many different mathematical and aesthetical approaches have been taken to tackle it. Visual complexity is an interesting website, where a large number of network visualizations are presented.