Web 2.0 was the “Web as a Platform”, as John Batelle and Tim O'Reilly aptly put it in their 2004 conference. But the transition from traditional computing platforms to the Cloud concept has been unlikely more difficult than the transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. Part of the problem was just exactly that mindset of Web 2.0 and its business models. Portland, OR, based Iterasi is a web archiving and online media monitoring company that blurred the boundaries between Web 2.0 and Cloud in many ways.

DMR: Pete, I’ve been following Iterasi for over two years now. Can you tell us what has changed since you started?

Pete Grillo: When we started the company two and a half years ago it was a different world. It was the world of Web 2.0. We were backed by investors and so we were in the middle of what’s trendy, and trends change and you have to be aware of that as a CEO. The Web 2.0 model was “You give it away and then you data mine it for some value.”.

Our line of business is archiving. We’re archiving web pages. The initial business models that we were most exciting about were based on “If I have an idea of what people are archiving – which is sort of like bookmarking on steroids – then there’s all kinds of great information I can gather.” Let me explain that. So there’s always impressions. There’s been impressions since day one: “What websites are people seeing?” But if you’re asking “What websites are people archiving?” then those are a sort of filtering of the most valuable sites people are seeing. So if you thought of every 100 pages you say in a given period of time: if you only archived one, is that good news or bad news? Well it’s good news for us because we have the top one percent interesting articles that you’ve seen. And so there’s really interesting information: Who are those authors? What are those properties? And again: what ads are appearing there?

So: brilliant model. I get all excited about it. You reacted positively to it, too. It seems to make tons of sense. But it really didn’t happen. I think there’s a bunch of factors why Web 2.0 didn’t take off. I think one of them is there’s just too much of it. There is so much available for free. How do you get on to that user’s desktop? How do you get their mind share?