Today, ecommerce and marketplaces are seeing boundaries dissolve as new software allows them to imbed their core competencies in other sites, ready to be used.This deployment and replication of both ecommerce and content will empower Web sites, just as chain stores and print syndication empowered a previous generation of business.

In the old days on the Net, it was all about driving traffic to your site. Today, it is increasingly about crossing barriers, reaching out to the whole universe of sites which fit your demographic or business model and imbedding your core competencies into other sites. This will transform the way business is conducted both on the Net and in the real, bricks and mortar world.

One of the pioneers in this transformation is Bowstreet which offers a product called Business Web Automation Factory, a suite of components which " let companies publish their core competencies as Web services, exchange Web Services more freely and embed them into other Web sites easily."

Jack Serfass, co-founder and co-chairman of Bowstreet speaks of "business webs" as a new and richer communication medium which is necessary to actually achieve the $2.7 trillion in e-commerce which is projected over the next few years. This innovative approach might also be described as using cutting edge software and the XML programming language to add an entirely new dimension to web sites: with this capability, sites can not only partner ( an efficient and effective concept on the Web, but old news) , they can reach way into the back end of the partner site, so, in effect, it is not simply a co-brand with a front door on another site, the partner's entire spectrum of capabilities exists right there, ready to be used in real time.

In Bowstreet's upcoming Business Web exchange, for example "a shipping company might offer a package-tracking service on the exchange, which could then be easily plugged into a retailer's site and customized for the retailer's use."

Looking at the ramifications, this can be an awesome advance for business, expanding distribution channels cost effectively at lightening speed.

Today, it is not just ecommerce and B2B marketplaces which are seeing boundaries dissolve. Content is beginning to be seen as a valuable resource which can be spawned from one site but imbedded in another to drive traffic and facilitate ecommerce. Net guru, Joe Firmage, writing in Business 2.O, in "The New Math", says : "Contrary to early predictions by some experts in this field, I believe that content, in all its rapidly diversifying forms, will be that most profitable kind of asset in the Internet Economy". He points out that content is very scalable, there is great leverage in deploying it, thereby allowing the possibility of the most robust operating profits.

With the frantic race for users and eyeballs, content, whether original, aggregated or repurposed, is beginning to be recognized as a key and highly valued element in creating the elusive "stickiness" which is vital in the competitive landscape.

Content, indeed, can become the engine which drives the marketing message. "How to" content is a prime example. And, as Joshua A. Ozersky points out in Business 2.0, "... a number of commercial sites are getting more traffic without even pretending to be noncommercial. Why bother sneaking in messasges when you just make your messge sufficiently rich that people will go out of their way to hear It?" So, in effect, on many sites, the marketing message becomes the content.

In fact, marketplace sites, relying on their transactions for revenue, have discovered it's not so easy to lure visitors when all your site has is bare bones transactions, however, technologically sophisticated, efficient and profitable to users. People still want content. If they are in business, they particularly want content which will help them succeed in business, whether through strategy, keeping up with the latest technology, learning how to leverage the Internet, or seeing over the horizon to the next, hot trend.

Content is very portable and can be easily imbedded in other sites. Like business processes or core competencies, the process of deploying content over a vast array of sites, or to different devices, hand held PDAs, wireless phones or pagers, is newly enabled by the Extensible Markup Language ( XML) which allows bits of data to be read and used, like a bar code does, without extensive and costly hard coding.

This deployment and replication of both ecommerce and content will empower Web sites, just as chain stores and print syndication empowered a previous generation of business. Business will be transformed and vastly enriched, both in the sense of empowerment and profitability. One more time, as Martha Stewart says, "It's a good thing."