Where is Content Headed (3)

Posted on September 26, 2006
Filed Under Channels and Content |

Continuing the count on the different kinds of content out there.

The Social Sites. Who would have thought a couple of years back that millions of us would now be building mini websites out of content filched from music videos or upload silos and comment content from friends. When social networking got going five years ago with social text, it looked dreary. Groove did nothing to convince me otherwise though it got Ray Ozzie a CTO job at Microsoft.

Back then all computing operated inside the paradigm of ultimate discipline. Software marshaled our behaviour. Today’s social networks look a real liberation. The latest play in social networks is Wallop. There is of course a tracker for social networking websites over at mashable and I picked up on Wallop there. Wallop is the all flash version of social networks which must take it somewhere along the road to second life.

Among the sites to look out for apart from the obvious myspace, facebook and bebo is facebox, a European site that’s been growing slowly over a couple of years.

Social networks have of course innovated on the revenue side, charging money for virtual objects and imaginary real estate. Hard to see that one playing out in front of a VC. And have the kind of numbers that attract advertisers, and a video ad service in videoegg.

I find an interesting area of social networks the move towards the YouTube territory and YouTube’s response, for example setting up specialist areas for performers like musicians and comedians. In fact performers had begun using YouTube and MySpace this way long before the channels were created.

Social networks may ultimately all occupy the same space as video upload sites and IPTV channels. They have the numbers, like google, to migrate around the web looking for business models. It’s scary to see new worlds so quickly made.

Digital lifestyle aggregators (DLAs. DLAs seem to be the next step forward, - sites where all your digital data resides - your Amazon Wish Lists, De.licio.us (social bookmarking) account, RSS feeds and presumably Outlook, RYZE, Linked in and other kind of data. Broadband mechanics seems to be the cheerleader.

Blogs. Blogs have clearly come into their own in a small number of cases, sites which dominate the news spectrum in an industry (Techcrunch, Scobeliser), or in taste (delicious days) or parenting (dooce).

Despite the fact that the ethos of blogs was supposedly anti-commercial blogs have spun dollars since the start (for example at weblogs.inc). Weblogs.inc and B5, Federated Media and one or two others continue to build professional blogging communities. A less commercial approach is The Good Blogs. These are distinct from blog aggregators. Blogbridge comes somewhere in between.

They all demonstrate that blogging is a kind of publishing platform that will be around for a long time, will sustain writers, win audiences and have extraordinarily good cost-revenue potential.

Mashups. Strictly speaking I suppose a techmeme or chuquet would be a mashup though I tend to think of them in terms of map mashups. And I think the bringing together of data and visuals is a special innovation. The wikipedia entry on mash ups is the best outline and summary I’ve found. Virtual video map allows people to click through a location on a map and watch videos from that location, while podbop, says Wikipedia, did the same for music. The big problem for mashups to date is finding a revenue stream but that could just be about applying imagination to their use rather than an integral commercial weakness here. I think mashups have enormous potential for information navigation.

Virtual environments. You look across the spectrum of sites where real life is taking place online and wonder, can it continue? At least that’s what you do at my age. I have a Second Life avatar, I enjoyed trying to learn how to use it, and I am happy to bypass that frustration. Clearly I belong in a majority because only a minority will go there but it will be a spectacular minority. Nick Laurence from Rivers Run Red, a Second Life pioneer, told me recently he expects numbers to be over 20 million by this time next year. All you can say is MySpace seems to have grown faster.

The Dutch site Eccky has taken the virtual life further than Second Life. Eccky characters now appear on real as well as virtual products and are widely used to market to young people.

More tomorrow.


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