Today, several articles caught my eye as I was surfing around my news sources during my Pagliacci Pizza lunch. For posterity, I've listed below my daily non-SEO news sources:

1. BBC News
2. Puget Sound Business Journal
3. New York Times Technology Section
4. Google News
5. Slate Magazine
6. Salon.com (Requires a membership)
7. The Economist
8. The International Herald Tribune
9. National Geographic News
10. Wired News

The first article to get my attention came from the Economist - Old News & a New Contender, which won't be online for long as the Economist protects content after several days. The article focuses on the BBC website's overwhelming domination of the online news media space in the UK and around the world. This domination has come seemingly at the expense of rival newspapers, who once competed in a space entirely seperate from the BBC - print, rather than radio or television. But, with so many young people turning to the web for their daily dose of the news, newspapers certainly are right to feel threatened.

This brings up another important point that news articles often don't touch upon - the value of being the behemoth in any industry during these early stages of the web. Clearly, with the BBC dominating the online eyeballs, their stories, perspectives and links also dominate the blogosphere, and thus, dominate the SERPs through the links that come in. As a long term strategy, sites like the BBC, who hold a sizeable digital audience in their grasp are getting the majority of the Internet's natural infrastrcuture - links - directed to them, which will certainly influence their traffic both now and in the future. Meanwhile, the loss of this infrastructure to less fortunate web properties could turn them into the Internet's equivalent of the one-horse town that never got a railroad station.

The next article that got my attention featured a similiar concept - it's a story from CNN Money calling Amazon's stock a laggard. I personally feel that based on this idea of infrastructure, Amazon can well afford not to profit substantially for many years to come. After all, they are building themselves as the dominant force in Internet retailing, and they've barely conquered any market outside the US. Based on the figures we all know about how product research is conducted, we can well assume that Amazon's growth strategy, both through loyal customers and through loyal links will reap a harvest that should make investors thrilled to be putting their money towards the online giant.

Clearly, we as SEOs are in an industry where the visibility of the Internet's link structure and its power can be felt every day. The only way to de-rail the seemingly inevitable course of the web towards a narrower and narrower viewpoint (as a few thousand powerful sites dominate all but the most obscure searches) is in the power of the search engines. If link structures eventually fall out of favor or global popularity ceases to influence the SERPs, we can predict a different kind of web, and a different kind of SEO neccessary to compete in it.