Old media vs. new media…and then some

Bart De Waele from Netlash made this presentation on old vs. new media recently. You can see the whole thing for yourself, but I wanted to mention a few things that stood out for me:

The comparison of old vs. new media to Jesus vs. the jester. Some people are trying to be the Next Big Thing when all they really need to do is light a few small fires. Making people laugh is sometimes an ability that is highly underrated.  It doesn’t HAVE to be an Avatar. A Juno will do quite well.

The power of real-time search and the shift from algorithm-based to social-powered search. More and more, I see friends asking for advice on Facebook about things they’re considering buying, so I agree with this.

The power of digital curation. When it comes to news, we don’t want to search for the news, we want the news to come to us – one of the many reasons why people use Twitter. Twitter hasn’t perfected the art yet, and Google News and others offer no way of serving up just what we’re looking for – I still wade through a lot of trash to get to the news that interests me. There’s a big role for digital curators in the future, as Bart says. Piers Fawkes at PSFK wrote a good post about what the future of blogs may be, and received an overwhelming response affirming the role of digital curators. However, Peter Rojas, publisher of Gizmodo and Engadget, made an interesting point when he said:

…….when I thought about what I wanted to do after Engadget I realized that there was something really interesting happening with the web — it was becoming more social, more dynamic, and more real-time, and I wanted to try and build a gadget site built around those ideas rather than one predicated on a team of editors cranking out posts.

I think FriendFeed went some way towards this, but it didn’t quite crack the code. I want to see things that interesting people (like some of the people I follow on Twitter) read and share on the web, but I don’t want to see comments of a personal nature they make to other friends (which includes personal stuff they share on Twitter, for example). With Google Reader I can ‘follow’ some people who choose to share their items with me, but I find that a lot of those items are from sites that are in my feed reader anyway. There’s a problem of duplication there, in other words. I think I’m describing a purely news-oriented Twitter – a sort of Google, FriendFeed and Twitter mash-up, where you follow people you want to, and get the content they’re into, on a real-time basis.

Another interesting comment from the PSFK post was:

It is endlessly frustrating to find a post that you put hours of loving care into get 1800 page views, and then throwing up a timewaster on LED encrusted eyelashes gets a hundred times that because of the power of DIGG.

There is nothing wrong with the medium of blogs, the problem is how the for-profit sites monetize it. That is why I think Fast Company and Atlantic are doing such a good job, they are bringing the discipline and editing of good magazines into the blog world and, I think, with their professionalism, will eat our lunch.

Now that is something that media outlets need to decide for themselves. Professionalism is a good thing. If the problem is the big supermarkets eating the small independent corner-shop, or the Fast Companies of this world eating smaller blogs, then the situation is the same as it was when globalization happened in South Asian countries like India years ago – some Mom and Pop shops died, but some didn’t. Sites like Unchained Guide are proof of the fact that there are plenty of independent boutiques that I personally would much rather patronise than H&M or Topshop in the UK, for example. Besides, if your blog is good, or popular (which is arguably more more important, from a monetization point of view), you may even get bought by a conglomerate, like Mashable is rumoured to be by AOL (whether or not the $15-25 million valuation is justified is a different issue altogether).

It’s called creating a niche for yourself.

I submit, however, that it IS irritating when sites like Digg give silly posts undue attention – I’m skeptical of the kind of people that use services like Digg in the first place. Taking this a bit further though, it would be useful to have a  Digg-type vote up/vote down functionality on the mash-up service I described above.