Category: BlogStreet

Fred Wilson writes:

When it comes to networks, the most powerful model is the self organizing network. That allows participants to move seamlessly between networks and takes out all the overhead of managing them.

But we really haven’t seen self organizing media networks take hold. Adsense is a self organizing network for publishers and advertisers, but not for the readers/consumers. You can’t put together a page that shows all the content that an email marketing ad has appeared on. You might be able to use search to do that, but it’s certainly not a seamless process.

This is in the context of FeedBurner Networks.

The New York Times writes:

When Mr. Schwartz was promoted to the top job at Sun this spring, he automatically became a member of an elite group: Fortune 500 C.E.O. bloggers. He is the only active member.

Where is everyone else?

Capital markets function as they should when the flow of information is strong and unimpeded. Mr. Schwartz has shown ably that for the chief executive sincerely interested in increasing information flow to the fullest range of stakeholders, a blog is a hydraulic wonder.
…
My No. 1 job is to be a communicator, Mr. Schwartz told me last week. I dont understand how a C.E.O. would not blog if committed to open communication.

WSJ writes:

As videos, blogs and Web pages created by amateurs remake the entertainment landscape, unknown directors, writers and producers are being catapulted into positions of enormous influence. Each week, about a half-million people download a comedic video podcast featuring a former paralegal. A video by a 30-year-old comedian from Cleveland has now been watched by almost 30 million people, roughly the audience for an average “American Idol” episode. The most popular contributor to the photo site Flickr.com just got a contract to shoot a Toyota ad campaign.

While online stardom can sometimes be fleeting, and some measures of audience size are subject to debate, a look at the rising stars in this world shows how the path to entertainment success is being redefined. Traditional media companies and marketers are already in pursuit of some of these new faces.

LexBlog Blog makes a great point:

Your blog is not going to become all things to all people on a niche topic. If that’s your goal, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

Be a success by sending your audience to what’s of value to them. That’ll guaranty they’ll keep coming back to you for more.

MediaShift has an interview with Erik Sundelof:

Events like Rodney King and similar events, its really interesting to have cell phones as part of the scene. Because its much harder to get away with that if you have 40 people with cell phones sending it in. You cant say, No, it was not police brutality. Well we have 40 different people saying they saw it with proof.

I really see an opening here for citizen contributions. The key here is that the media organizations need to realize they are losing control. They cant really control [the news] now because people are posting this stuff to other blogs. I think it would be better to merge traditional reporting with citizen media rather than have a [totally] new media. To take the best of the old fashioned news organizations and bring in the power of the bloggers, because you have so many people investigating. Mix them and you have an extremely good organization and youll have content thats really important in finding out the truth.

The Guardian writes:

It’s an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will “interact” with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it.

It’s a meme that emerges strongly in statistics from YouTube, which in just 18 months has gone from zero to 60% of all online video viewing.

The numbers are revealing: each day there are 100 million downloads and 65,000 uploads – which as Antony Mayfield points out, is 1,538 downloads per upload – and 20m unique users per month.

Nick Bradbury discusses the two approaches: “While I believe the river of news approach is a great way to quickly scan for interesting articles, I agree with Chip Camden that it’s often more useful to group new articles by their source feed. I need to put each article into context, so a steady stream of articles from different sources doesn’t work for me.”

Jeff Jarvis writes:

Forget consumerism. We’re not just consumers anymore, as Doc Searls has taught me well. We are customers with our money in our fists, spending it wisely and joining together to spend it more wisely. And we are producers who can compete with the companies that thought of us as mere consumers.

So nevermind caveat emptor. This is the age of caveat venditor — let the vendor beware — and caveat creator.

Dave Winer writes:

Imagine a newspaper that got more and more clogged with old stuff every day, as every category of news accumulated all the old stories you didn’t read, and showed them to you every time you looked, as if this time you might actually want to read a story that you didn’t want to read the last 80 times you looked.

Your daily newspaper doesn’t tell you that you haven’t read 83,284 articles, why should your computer-based news tool?

Well, that’s how most feed readers work, and it’s just plain wrong. Your software should, instead, find the new stuff since the last time you looked and show you that first.

Seth Godin has some ideas:

The Diggers, the posters, the surfers… these are very highly-leveraged people. Call them the Legion of Super Surfers. Okay, bad acronym, maybe not. Call them the league of the leading edge.

The leading edge has always been important. Now, though, since they have a megaphone, since Digg and the others are amplifying their movements, they are far, far more important than ever before.

And that’s Digg’s asset. They have aggregated the league.

So what now?

Get permission.

Get permission to fead the League tidbits about the future. The reason they are Diggers is that they like being first, they like discovering cool stuff and then sharing it. So organize that process and monetize it.