It has been far too long since I last posted on this blog given I would like to post once a week. Jon and I have been discussing repositioning the blog to focus on new areas. I think that is absolutely necessary. Rather than take a role as a blog dedicated to keeping you up to date on the latest MySpace traffic numbers, I am more inclined to try to guess what people will be doing in the future than reporting on what is happening now. That means looking at spaces with more unanswered questions. To the point, social networks by themselves are no longer compelling; what is compelling is what you do with or enable for groups of people, whether those people are or are not explicitly "friends" in the online social network sense of the word. To that end, I want to learn more about services such as iMeem that are enabling and facilitating user-empowerment to the extent useful content is created. But that is just the start.
Citizen journalism, personalization and online media -- both including stalwarts like the NY Times and popular vlogs like RocketBoom -- offer up many possibilities, including going to a space of digital content expansion past the typed word. Questions about the future of blog networks as acquisition targets by big media are important; those acquisitions beg the question, can bloggers really be acquired? I ask that because even if a major company lets a blog network operate separately, they still face influences that could pervert their perspectives that they otherwise would not experience by being totally independent. The result is the integrity of and thus the usefulness of those blog posts go down. But that is just my speculation. It remains to be seen how it will really play out, but I think Battelle is right. We await more on his Federated Media start-up.
Knowing what best to do with all this blog content is still far
from resolved. TailRank, Findory, Sphere
and Memeorandum come to mind. I want to
explore amateur video. Google Video and
Yahoo Video are players in video search. YouTube and OurMedia look at the task a bit
differently. Browsing through YouTube,
even the highest ranked content seems to lack a certain level of resolution
quality that could be solved by improving video-camera technologies. Then things can really change: what happens
when a camera phone can store 10 hours of video of the same quality as you get
from premium handheld video recorders? A
lot. This has been buzzed about for over
a year,
and we are still a ways off from seeing a major impact. At the same time, we see big media like
Warner through AOL Television trying to unlock the value of their content over
the long tail. Stay tuned as we
transition from social networks to online media and beyond.
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