Category: BlogStreet

Robert Young writes:

Social integration targets the ownership of critical assets in the social media supply chain (e.g. social networks like MySpace or People Aggregator, socially-programmed video services like YouTube or VideoEgg, social photo services like Photobucket or Flickr, socially-curated news sites like Digg or Newsvine, etc.). But in a radical departure from the old vertical and horizontal integration strategies of traditional media, social integration recognizes the fact that social media, by definition, shifts much of the media supply functions directly into the hands of the audience itself.

In other words, with social media, the consumers are in control of production, programming, and distribution which is a complete reversal of the traditional media model. This reversal in control leads to some interesting consequences, the most obvious being the impact it has on the translation of core competencies within traditional media organizations (they become largely obsolete in the context of social media). But the greater long-term consequences of social integration involve strategic market development.

Jeff Jarvis writes:

I think a better term for what Ive been calling citizen journalism might be networked journalism.

Networked journalism takes into account the collaborative nature of journalism now: professionals and amateurs working together to get the real story, linking to each other across brands and old boundaries to share facts, questions, answers, ideas, perspectives. It recognizes the complex relationships that will make news. And it focuses on the process more than the product.
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In networked journalism, the public can get involved in a story before it is reported, contributing facts, questions, and suggestions. The journalists can rely on the public to help report the story; well see more and more of that, I trust.

Jason Calacanis writes:

Here is the new model:

1. Start a blog with adsense and make spare change.
2. Scale a blog to 250k to 1M pages a month and become big enough for Federated Media, AdBrite, and Blogads to care about you (i.e. sell your inventory)–now you’re making a living.
3. Scale over 1M pages a month and become big enough that you can afford your own sales group and fire Federated Media for taking 40% of your money because your cost of sales will be 15-20% as a stand alone business.

This is exactly what happened at the start of the Internet. DoubleClick used to do ad sales just like Battelle is doing at Federated Media. They got out of that business because the reward for helping a client to phase three was that they fired you–it sucks as a business (I still can’t understand why John got into it… I think he actually wants to help authors, which is noble, but I think as a business it doesn’t scale).

Robert Scoble addresses criticism that podcasting is not as efficient as reading text:

Peter Davis says: “In the time I can listen to an average podcast, I could have caught up on my 50 favorite blogs, or read a chapter in a book, or read the latest issue of Red Herring magazine.”

You might be shocked to hear me say this, but Peter is right.

So, why am I joining a podcasting company if Peter is right? Cause I’d love Peter to explain to me how he reads RSS when he’s driving. Or, as someone told me recently, while walking in the Scottish Highlands.

Or, try exercising while reading a Tablet PC. I’ve tried, it doesn’t work for me.

Walking around town with my SmartPhone out and reading it gets me branded a freak.

See, what you’re missing is podcasting opens up a new usage model that text can’t serve.

Jay Rosen posted this on his blog recently:

The people formerly known as the audience are those who were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few firms competing to speak very loudly while the rest of the population listened in isolation from one another and who today are not in a situation like that at all.
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Once it was your radio station, broadcasting on your frequency. Now that brilliant invention, podcasting, gives radio to us. And we have found more uses for it than you did.

Shooting, editing and distributing video once belonged to you, Big Media. Only you could afford to reach a TV audience built in your own image. Now video is coming into the users hands, and audience-building by former members of the audience is alive and well on the Web.

TechCrunch has a discussion following a post by Newsgator CTO Greg Reinacker.

Highlights discussed include:

* recommending feeds
* niche default subscription options
* social networking/comments about feeds
* RSS everywhere – where else can it go?
* feeds and podcasts by phone
* advertising, enterprise and private label possibilities.
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RSS is the foundation of almost everything Web 2.0 – isnt it? Its what makes blog readership scalable, podcasts subscribable, wiki changes watchable and so much more. If Newsgatgor can succeed in offering the kind of innovative features this roadmap alludes to, without falling into the trap of crass commercialism, Reinackers vision could be deeply influential for the future of the medium.

Dave Winer writes: “We live in the age that Emerson predicted, self-reliance. Make your own music and your own products. Everyone gets to be creative. The brains are in what we used to call the audience. No more looking up to the ivory tower for all fulfillment. Thank god we don’t all have to be as beautiful as Farah Fawcett and Christopher Reeve. Everyone gets to sing. Users and developers party together.”

WSJ has an interview with Jakob Nielsen:

You say you like traditional newsletters emailed to customers instead of news feeds. Why so? Don’t they contribute just as much to information overload?

The best ones don’t. With the best ones, it’s like a service you are waiting for and expecting. The email newsletter comes to you; it arrives in your in box, and becomes part of the one place you go to get information. That’s the great strength.

The best newsletters really drive customer relationships. But they have to be very good, very targeted to a specific user’s actual needs. And it’s got to be very timely as well. For example, one newsletter is called ‘Your Baby This Week,’ and is targeted at new parents and, in particular, new mothers. It talks on a weekly basis of what you can expect for your new baby. That is something that is extremely relevant, so people really look forward to getting that particular newsletter. Unless a newsletter is very good, people will just say, ‘Oh no, more information.’

Jeff Jarvis writes:

Newspapers have long thought of themselves as bakeries: They gather the raw materials, measure them carefully, mix them up, let them rise, cut and shape them, bake them to a golden crisp, slather some cherry goo on top, and then put them on the shelf, waiting for someone to buy them. News was a product. No more.

So whats the better metaphor? Try a garden: Anyone can plant seeds in it (reporters ideas, editors curiosities, the publics questions) and many can tend to them (insert fertilizer gag here). When the fruit is ripe, its plucked and published; the farmers live by the gardens schedule. And if you keep tending the garden, it continues to bloom. News is a process.

Jon Udell calls it reader-created context and explains:

Everything about this buzzphrase annoys me. First, calling people “users” is pernicious. It distances and dehumanizes, and should be stricken from the IT vocabulary (see Those clueless users) as well as from the publishing vocabulary. IT has customers and clients, not users. IT-oriented publishers have readers, not users.

Second, “content” is a word that reminds me more of sausage than of storytelling (see Sausage, traffic, and clueless users). As writers and editors we don’t “generate” “content,” we tell stories that inform, educate, and entertain — or should.

Now that the original vision of a two-way web is finally made real, we can distinguish between amateur storytellers (in the best and highest sense of amateur) and professional storytellers. Thanks to the contributions of the amateurs — who are of course professional practitioners of the disciplines that we “cover” — we can tell deeper, richer, more well-informed stories about the products and services they create, and the work they do. Those stories are valuable, and the business I want to be in is based on that value, not on the “monetization” of “user-generated content”.