Most of us, whether we recognize it or not, have a passion about something. Now that expertise has a place to go. Bit by bit over the past 10 years, the Web has erected a global platform for personal wisdom. Services like AdSense—along with other advertising outfits, including one called Blogads, which focuses exclusively on blogs—are simply the final plank. You can now compose, design, publish, promote, and make money from your writing without ever leaving your desk.

Johnson says:

It’s not enough to quit your day job yet, but that’s partly the point. Most blogs aren’t full-time occupations. They’re hobbies, diversions, places for people to share their wisdom with strangers. Before the Web, finding a venue to write about personal passions was almost impossible. Now you can publish your thoughts to a global audience—and get rewarded for it in the process. Haughey calls the new generation of amateur Web publishers the “thousandaires.” “There are going to be a lot of people making a thousand bucks from writing about stuff that interests them,” and “That’s awesome.”

"content that is not available through traditional distribution channels but could nevertheless find an audience ."

For the most part, that's niche content.

The high tech industry analysts have been slow to adopt blogs. That's about to change.

 

At first glance, the slow spread of analyst blogs seems illogical. We expect the analysts to embrace new technologies. We expect the analysts to embrace tools that can increase their visibility and effectiveness as thought leaders. Where the two intersect -- new technologies and new communications channels -- we expect to find analyst nirvana. So, why the slow uptake?

 

Blogs present a fundamental cultural change for the analyst business. Analyst business processes assume analysts have control of interactions with clients and research subjects. These processes also ensure that findings and opinions are subjected to scrutiny and polish before public release. Blogs fly in the face of those processes.

James Governor of RedMonk says that analyst business models are broken. He and partner Stephen O’Grady have begun using their blogs to develop a new business strategy for their firm. They started the effort, which they’ve dubbed an “open source analysis” strategy, thinking only of their own firm. They are encouraging candid, constructive dialogue. In return, some bloggers are encouraging them to create a precedent that could begin transforming the industry analyst community at large.

The up side is significant. Very few analyst blogs are blatant marketing vehicles. Initial adopters generally report that weblogs, wikis and forums are invigorating their practices by offering more IT user perspectives, greater industry visibility, and more opportunities to engage with users and vendors.

 

• Overture - provider of pay-for-performance search results to web sites across the Internet. A Yahoo! subsidiary.
• DoubleClick (Nasdaq:DCLK) - allows highly targeted ad campaigns across multiple web sites with a single buy.
• Interactive Advertising Bureau - devoted to promoting the use and effectiveness of advertising on the Internet.
• Hagen Software, Inc. - developer of e-Classifieds, a classified ads software program for web sites.
• Google AdWords - text-based advertising program where participants create their own ads, choose keywords that determine when they will appear, and pay only when someone clicks on the ad.
• TeknoSurf.com - offers direct marketing services to companies with an Internet presence.
• Advertising.com - offers banner ads, web site advertising, and marketing services.
• BURST! Media - providing advertising sales and management services.
• Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) - a cooperative group of Internet advertisers. Site provides consumers with information about online advertising practices and the ability to "opt-out" of targeted advertising.
• Fastclick - offers a network as well as tools for serving, tracking, and reporting of online campaigns and user statistics.

Pender Growth Fund (VCC) Inc. is an established, diversified venture capital fund that invests in technology companies within the province of British Columbia with the objective of long-term capital appreciation. Pender Growth Fund is now the first fund of its kind in British Columbia to focus specifically on expansion and restructuring opportunities within the technology sector that offer investors the potential for liquidity through either existing public listings or near term liquidity events.

Pender Growth Fund is an investment vehicle with significant tax incentives for retail investors to participate in the recovery and growth of the British Columbia technology sector. The Fund has approximately $13 million of assets under management.

This should not be a huge surprise. The first "branded blogging community" will go into beta Feb 15, 05. www.blog-n-play (gotta love the name!). SYS-CON Media is offering free blogs or you can mirror your existing blog on 16, what amounts, to channels like Linux Business Week, Java Developers Journal, Web Services Journal. They anticipate over 1,000,000 bloggers will sign up.

Yeah, it's a techie deal but wonder when we'll see other verticals picking up on this concept. Can't be far down the road. Branded Blogging Community

Here is an excerpt from an article by Dan Gilmore. Good points for Wired Tribes.

Every newspaper of any quality has published hundreds of articles that readers can find nowhere else and which bloggers, among others, would surely cite and point to as a vital part of the permanent record of a community. These include investigative pieces, certain features and other stories. If available upon publication at a permanent URL, they quickly rise in search engine rankings, where others will find them later.

I'm convinced that increasingly sophisticated Web advertising, especially keyword-based text ads, will create a revenue stream of some size for such stories. This will be especially the case when they've moved high enough in search-engine rankings to be found without searching the newspaper's site, but that's not crucial.

A locally targeted ad based on a keyword will bring new kinds of advertisers to the newspaper: small businesses that couldn't afford to buy space in the print edition. This is new money. It may not replace what papers are losing to the online competition, but it's worth something.

Many articles won't have that broad appeal. But they will have special meaning to smaller numbers of people who will want to point to them from their personal sites. They will reinforce people's sense that the newspaper is a medium of record in their lives. That's also worth something.

What’s missing now is a business infrastructure for a decentralized market, an eBay of content. The reaction of media companies and potential new players has been to aggregate new talent (it’s cheaper than old talent), putting people on staff to create a dense collection of stuff (content) an audience wants to read, hear, or see.

That kind of organization carries a whole lot of fixed costs, from desks and offices to expense accounts and bills for offsite meetings where strategy is discussed. Yet the market is full of lone wolves who are getting their markets together without the overhead, making their product cheaper and bringing it to market faster, since no one has to sign off on an idea. Things are tried fast and new mistakes are made, but product is flowing.

The real opportunity now is not to create a portal or aggregate everything, but to build a promotional and transactional system that can reach across many technologies to bring the online personality into direct economic contact with their audiences. The search systems aren’t the right fix, nor are any of the ad-placement systems. Something deeper, a real network based on flexible economics, is needed. Some things will be free to the customer, though supported by ads, and much will come at a fee, as well as every mix of free and pay-to-play you can imagine.

Young people just aren't interested in reading newspapers and print magazines. In fact, according to Washington City Paper, The Washington Post organized a series of six focus groups in September to determine why the paper was having so much trouble attracting younger readers. You see, daily circulation, which had been holding firm at 770,000 subscribers for the last few years, fell more than 6 percent to about 720,100 by June 2004, with the paper losing 4,000 paying subscribers every month.

Imagine what higher-ups at the Post must have thought when focus-group participants declared they wouldn't accept a Washington Post subscription even if it were free. The main reason (and I'm not making this up): They didn't like the idea of old newspapers piling up in their houses.

Don't think for a minute that young people don't read. On the contrary, they do, many of them voraciously. But having grown up under the credo that information should be free, they see no reason to pay for news. Instead they access The Washington Post website or surf Google News, where they select from literally thousands of information sources. They receive RSS feeds on their PDAs or visit bloggers whose views mesh with their own. In short, they customize their news-gathering experience in a way a single paper publication could never do. And their hands never get dirty from newsprint.

The Post experience merely mirrors the results of a September study (.pdf) by the Online Publishers Association, which found that 18- to 34-year-olds are far more apt to log on to the internet (46 percent) than watch TV (35 percent), read a book (7 percent), turn on a radio (3 percent), read a newspaper (also 3 percent) or flip through a magazine (less than 1 percent).

In Blink ($26, Little, Brown), author Malcolm Gladwell makes the argument that people frequently make some of their best decisions in mere seconds. We think without thinking, sizing up situations and determining how we feel about someone or something based not on voluminous new information, but rather on our accumulated experiences. And, Gladwell says, that's a good thing.

Look, I really don't need 50 bullet points to know I want something. I just need to be shown a little leg. I can get all the details later, back at the hotel room etc.

I am always intrigued by these broad prognostications. There is an excellent point in this article, but is mass marketing going away. I don't think so. If we are looking at the long tail, there is still that big bell in the middle called the mainstream. Can't we just say that marketing to the long tail represents a big opportunity that wasn't there before and simply requires new approach and we are all trying to figure that one out.

Despite my comment above, the article below makes some good points.

If you think about the long tail, blogging is the same phenomenon as the music creation described in the article. With blogging, everybody can express his opinion or passion. We know it, the audience of weblogs is getting higher and higher, but it is highly fragmented. Of course there are nodes, but most of the audience is on the tail, because it is much more important for you to read your close friend than to watch CNN, to learn about your passion on somebody blogging about it than to read, say, a sports monthly mag.

It is a new challenge to marketers. Buying 30 seconds ads was easy, being present on millions of micro sources, identifying the ones that matter to the brand, communicating in an efficient way with these people, is a totally different story. It is not about putting an ad anymore, it is about treating customers and potential customers as partners.

David Jackson has written a compelling argument for Yahoo! buying Six Apart, the makers of Movable (one 'E') Type and TypePad (and now the new owners of LiveJournal). As I've written here before I'm surprised that many of the blog plays haven't been snapped up already. I could see the likes of Bloglines, del.icio.us, Technorati, etc. being taken out by a Microsoft, Google, Yahoo or (gaps!) even AOL. I never considered Six Apart as a target but as Dave clearly shows there's good reason to buy them. I could see Google snagging them as a way to protect all those blog pages on Six Apart based blogs that are already part of Google's AdSense program (like my blog). It sure seems like a question of 'when' and not 'if' these guys will be acquired. Too bad none of them are public companies so we could join in on the fun.

Remember, Amazon is a dot-com winner because it made things easier and more convenient. The real Long Tail winners are going to be the ones that make getting what you want almost as easy as changing the channel.

Source:  http://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2005/01/long_tail_tv_pa.html#comments

Most people use new media so they know what is important, what has happened and what may happen.

How does it work?

Frassle doesn't bother trying to get groups of people to agree. In frassle, the important relationships are between pairs of people; and even then, we only expect partial agreement. What we may or may not agree about is the meaning of a category.

Determining the extent to which we agree is easy. Because every document on the internet has a URL, we can simply compare lists of URLs. If our lists for a pair of categories look alike, we have similar ideas of what those categories mean.

Consider for example this article from the New York Times. I would categorize it under "library science" and "search". If you categorize it under "librarians" and "reference", frassle can learn a correlation between my categories "library science" and "search" and your categories "librarians" and "reference". It might record information like this:

the relevance of	your category	to my category	is
	librarians	library science	35%
	librarians	search	12%

Based on this information, the next time you post something under librarians, frassle can suggest it for my library science category with 35% confidence. If I accept that suggestion, the correlation increases—frassle learns that your idea of librarians is pretty similar to my idea of library science.

That's the basic power of frassle—it discovers agreement between people, and helps each of them utilize that agreement. By sharing our categorization information this way, we can each contribute to the other's directory, without any prior planning.

A key to the widespread adoption of Web information to date is the ability to connect openly with individuals and groups who share common interests, a trend that should continue.

A combination of personal, aggregate and networked contextualizing of information nodes and their linking methods has wide-ranging potential for many dimensions of personal knowledge management efforts.

The critical need for personal information management and publishing is to bring the fluency that Weblogging software has created for publishing to the process of connecting and integrating information, leading to a storehouse of personal knowledge.

The first main Internet trend for self-expression was the personal home page, with its list of favorite links and text about likes and dislikes. Soon this trend developed into individual Web sites, where many individuals, small groups or independent businesses could explain themselves to anyone with an interest. Weblogging extends this trend of self-expression to dynamic, almost continually prolific linking and commentary about life and any kind of information on the Web. The proliferation of alternative linking and distribution methods allows users to both stream information to one another for reading, but also to weave a dense network of links throughout the Web with their own personal perspective and preferences as one hub.

Contents

• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Next Big Thing
• 3 Grand Vision
  • Scenario A: Managing Information of Diverse Types
    • Implications of this scenario
  • Scenario B: Passive Information Sharing and Active Privacy Protection
    • Implications of this scenario
  • Scenario C: The Importance of Temporal Context in Making Sense of Content
    • Implications of this scenario
• 4 Weblogs Today and Tomorrow
  • Reading Blogs
  • Authoring Systems
  • Connections between Bloggers
  • Popularity
• 5 Short-term PIKII Opportunities
  • Recommender systems
  • Online Communities Of Interest
  • Business Use of Weblogs
• 6 Summary of Current Issues
• 7 Looking Ahead
• 8 Conclusion
• Acknowledgements
• Request for Feedback
• References
• Notes

Elsewhere, some people are starting to question the viability of a single, open access blogging world, whilst others are looking for more sophisticated forms of collaboration than blogs currently provide.

So, whilst there will be more public blogs sprouting this year, we expect to see greater focus on internal blogging within and between organisations, and this will require new features and tools to support more task- and work-oriented requirements. Blogs are great for collaborative sense making among a network or group of people, but as Ton Zijlstra wrote some time ago, it is important to be able to move seamlessly from the sense making mode to the actionable sense mode, where interaction becomes more focused on doing something. Wikis and other collaboration tools (every morning at Headshift we bow before our JIRA overlord, for example) are currently the logical progression when people develop a common purpose in blog-based discussion that requires focused action. There will be more.

A mini-ethnography of social practices in a distributed classification community

[Note: This is a project I did for a class on social and communicative aspects of the internet, taught by Chuck Kinzer. Not a 'real' study, but you might find some of the literature review and listed resources helpful. I hope to continue to do research on distributed classification systems such as del.icio.us]

Abstract

Working within the constraints of a very limited data sample, this study attempts to identify some of the information management and meaning construction practices of an online distributed classification (a.k.a. free tagging or ethnoclassification) community. Specifically, this study seeks to investigate the social and communicative practices that emerge when users are encouraged to share web links with one another by using a metadata keyword, or tag, to demark a social group, apart from using other tags to classify links according to an emergent taxonomy.