Bob's blog

The Internet in Middle Earth?

I'm not sure if it's Middle Earth is in the Internet (which it surely is) or that the Internet is part of Middle Earth. It's not a huge leap to think that there are Lord of the Rings fans on the Internet. But, I apparently missed the bigger connection.

I saw an article on TechCrunch about "Old Media" and discussions from the Mediabistro Circus last week in New York City. It sounds like I missed a good session given by Chris Anderson, the Editor-in-Chief of Wired. He talked about the relationship and interactions between traditional media sources and user generated content along with corrosponding ad cost models. Chris has been talking about The Long Tail for nearly four years now and has some interesting thoughts on where the money is. He has a robotics site DIYDrones that's hosted on Ning. It's a not a large study, but I believe it shows the value of niche or "long tail" sites - he sees greater than ten-fold revenue for his ads on that network versus the standard rates on MySpace. His advice at the conference to help drive that: “Be the tallest dwarf.”

From dwarfs to Digg, at the same conference. Daniel Burka talks against the "notion of One Page To Rule Them All," even with Digg which brings together headlines from around the web. It's an issue of control or the lack thereof. There's not single source for information that can cover everyone's interest. Yes, you can search for the information but the idea of a central portal is long gone. That's why custom tools and aggregators like FriendFeed are becoming more popular. I get my news and feeds from a variety of sources and I fully expect the number of sources to grow. There's no way for traditional media to keep up and try to control those interactions.

Other than the Lord of the Rings references, the theme at the conference was about accepting and embracing the conversations that the web enables. That not only adds value to social networks but the traditional media. Enabling that conversation keeps readers engaged and helps make the experience more valuable for others. I didn't see any references to hobbits but I'm sure that I can figure out where Frodo fits in...

Posted at 11:40PM May 27, 2008 by bs in Web.next  |