Clearly, the new media companies get this and even the old media guys are learning quickly. One solution is to offer branded RSS readers and blogs for their audiences. That makes some sense for a certain type of service. It makes a lot of sense if the media company is actually participating in the aggregation of information sources going into and coming out of those RSS readers and member blogs.
JD Lasica:
During his panel today, Len [Apcar] said that he and [The New York Times] don't want to be seen as one-way, take-it-or-leave-it big media, and they're constantly looking at ways to bring readers into a burgeoning converation. He said, "I look at OhmyNews as a form of social networking. We're looking very closely at our audience. We have user content in the paper now in terms of movie reviews, hotels I stayed at, ... and we want to do more."
During his panel today, Len [Apcar] said that he and [The New York Times] don't want to be seen as one-way, take-it-or-leave-it big media, and they're constantly looking at ways to bring readers into a burgeoning converation. He said, "I look at OhmyNews as a form of social networking. We're looking very closely at our audience. We have user content in the paper now in terms of movie reviews, hotels I stayed at, ... and we want to do more."
But there has to be a way to facilitate and aggregate conversations that are already happening out there in the world. I'm a member of just about every social network tool available, and I use any one of them only on rare occasion. I visit countless media properties and blogs on any given day, but I rarely, if ever comment at that site. I do, however, create content in the form of behavior (every time I search or something, subscribe to a new feed, spend more than 15 seconds on an article, etc.). I also create and publish content through my own means (a personal photo site, a blog, my professional web site, email, etc.).
I'm sure there are tools and technologies that a media property could offer that would get me closer to what I want. And there are cases where branded RSS readers may serve an interesting and valuable purpose. For example, I would love to know what the collective brainpool at The Economist is reading, including the editors and the business teams, and I'd be willing to use a branded RSS reader on their site if the tool reflected the reading habits of their staff. I suspect that good tagging habits would be even more useful to me.
However, I think there's an even bigger opportunity to find a way to pull in the connective tissue that already exists out there and create a platform for connecting people. Steve Gillmor is laying down that foundation technically with attention.xml, a format for tracking the way people behave on the Internet:
This open cloud of reputational presence and authority can be mined by
each group of constituents. Users can barter their attention in return
for access to full content, membership priviliges, and incentives for
strategic content. Vendors can build on top of that cloud of data with
their own special sauce–the newbie crowd of MyYahoo, the pacesetter
early adopters of Diller/Ask/Bloglines, the social attention farm of
RoJo, and Google’s emerging Office service components orchestrated by
the core GMail inforouter. And the media, which now includes
publishers, analysts, researches, rating services, advertisers,
sponsors, and underwriters, can use the data as a giant inference
engine for leveraging the fat middle of the long tail.
Ok, Steve, you've got my attention.
Tags:
stevegillmor,
socialnetworking,
rss,
rojo,
ohmynews,
nweyorktimes,
media,
jdlasica,
charleneli,
blog,
attentionxml,
aggregation
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