Scott Karp has a great post dissecting new media along the lines of the historical 3 pieces of the puzzle: Content Creation, Distribution and Aggregation.
He points out that creation can be done anywhere by almost anyone now online. True. Go We-Media! Go YOU!
Scott also points out that aggregation and distribution are very scalable businesses online which we are seeing in Youtube, Myspace, Facebook and Search. Agreed.
But, he doesn't delineate very well between distribution and aggregation. That's because we don't really have any great examples of pure online distribution companies. The only two examples I could think of are google adsense (and site search) and amazon's product affiliate system. (Google's new video ad distribution system is a new example.) But, these distribution platforms wouldn't work well unless the companies first won their respective aggregation platform games. There are more niche vertical companies like Zillow, Zvents, Simply Hired, Edgeio that are trying to aggregate enough to make a compelling case for distribution too. But, it's backwards.
Distribution should come before Aggregation. In old media, multiple distributors assembled media from different sources and distributed it to the aggregators. This created a balance of power between all 3 players in the chain. This doesn't exist in online media. Why? Because most distributors try to aggregate. And most aggregators try to distribute.
This is a BIG problem for the democratization of media. If distribution and aggregation are owned by the same entities, creators have little leverage in the value chain. And aggregators can create mono-culture. Think cable access companies owning cable channels (They do) or charging other channels for carriage (They do). Think newspapers owning the distribution points (They don't luckily for us.). Think radio stations programming for 50 cities from one headquarters (They do). Without separate distribution and aggregation, all of the content we-the-media create doesn't really get distributed properly.
Of course, you could say that there'll always be google's algorithm or Youtube's upload button or the ability to customize your myspace page. But, there's no guarantee that publishing your content to the web, Youtube or myspace will garner any attention because there is no sure fire way to get distribution. From the reader side, there's NetVibes and Bloglines and My Yahoo. I can customize these things til my heart's content to consume the information I want to consume. But, how will I find out about new things? Am I really discovering new things by susbcribing to some content creator's RSS feed in this way? No. I know... There's techmeme and my friend's bookmark's on del.icio.us who can filter for me. But, maybe I still want professionals to filter and aggregate my information. Or maybe I want techmeme's audience to filter the celebrity gossip I read. Or maybe I want more transparency into how information is aggregated for me. Maybe I want to aggregate stuff myself w/ my own algorithms.
RSS and blog search engines held some promise a year ago. But, google is taking over that game. Open schemas and open ping systems were getting a lot of attention a year ago. But, pubsub died. Progress is slow. Microformats and Marc Canter are the only ones still forging onward. Albeit pretty slowly: Marc bootstraps and people are talking Technorati's impending doom. From a funding perspective, it isn't obvious how these types of companies or efforts will make any money. These types of companies are judged in the eyes of google and the almighty PPC or myspace and the almighty network of musicians, horny boys and marketers. So, they have to position themselves as search companies or social networking companies. Not distribution or syndication companies. But, that's what they should be. They should be leveraging the multiple publishing platforms that publish in machine readable language and helping niche aggregators slice and dice and deliver the content their audiences want. They should be supplying feeds to aggregators. White labelling their solutions. They should be making it possible for a million aggregators to bloom by building on their strength to distribute, analyze and organize information.
And they should get paid by the aggregators. And they should, in turn, pay the content creators.
And that's how we'll create a healthy online media ecosystem.
NOT One that's NO better than the old one where only star content creators make a living and large aggregators fight for their exclusive rights to distribute. Like this. That's not what WE want.
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