After reviewing Scott Karp’s post on integrating elements of “old” and “new” media, I took a look at Umair Haque’s response, along with Umair’s earlier “case study” posts on newspapers and Memeorandum, and a link- and insight-filled post by Fred Wilson entitled “Living on the Edge (the rise of the edge feeder).
Scott’s post suggests how a major publisher might leverage the value of web-based “conversation” as part of the “synthesis” that takes place within its editorial process and, further, can combine these two functions with the credibility its brand has established within the marketplace of ideas. This struck me as a very sensible idea.
Umair seemed to agree, but only in part:
Of course, the call for synthesis in [Scott’s] post also misses half the equation - reconstructors like Memeorandum are valuable because they synthesize, or reconstruct microchunks into coherent streams of attention. The shift away from manager at the core to DJesque choreographer at the edge is something many of us have felt for a long time; the problem, of course, has been the “cannibalization” of traditional media business models - they can’t capture any value from conversation. That’s why media needs edge competencies. Management innovation has to be backed up with business model innovation, and, often, product/service innovation. Edge competencies are the unification of all these.
This got me thinking about the role Memeorandum plays in my own media consumption and generation, and how things might evolve from where we are today. It also prompted me to go back and read Umair’s earlier post on Memeorandum and Fred’s post (and a piece Fred cites by Jeff Jarvis), which contrasts Google Base (a centralized “freebase”), with “edge feeder” models like Flickr, MySpace, del.icio.us and a new crop of “video feeders.”
Thinking about Memeorandum’s functionality reminded me of a point Scott made contrasting the elegance of the iPod and Google search with the unwieldiness of today’s RSS functionality. It also got me thinking about where—and why—Memeorandum fits on the “elegance” and “user-friendly” continuum and how using it (as both consumer and creator of content) relates to the “integration” model Scott discusses, and the broader evolution from Media 1.0 to Media 2.0.
Though sparse esthetically, Memeorandum has its own form of simple elegance, which accompanies a functional utility that is hard to match from any other source—at least in the tech and political arenas (I only use the former, but assume this is also true for politics). As someone who reads a lot of articles and blogs, and also writes a blog, articles and research reports, Memeorandum provides a very simple and easy way to track fast-changing developments in the tech world and to quickly digest what’s being said about them by people I respect, including both “bloggers” and “journalists.” It also provides a convenient way to jump into the dialog, if I think I have something to add to the conversation, or if I simply want to add another “human” layer of editorial function for readers of IP Democracy, some of which presumably don’t have time to do as much reading as I do.
This last point speaks to the interaction between the algorithmic elegance of Memeorandum—which leverages the power of links, but is therefore also dependent on them—and the value provided by the “experienced human” editorial function Scott suggests is key to the “synthesis” function (and, still today, often to the “credibility” function).
Compared to the process of consuming traditional media, the process of using Memeorandum remains relatively “lumpy” and time-consuming, in that the “synthesis” occurs as I read the main “source” piece, some or all of the “discussion” items listed next to it, and, in some cases, one or more items to which these “discussion” posts provide links. If I’m lucky, someone else has already done much of the work for me—provided a synthesis of the “conversation” and some perspective on it that makes sense to me, hopefully with plenty of links if I want to take the time to dig more deeply myself. These writers (whether they be journalists or bloggers) become my “go to” media sources for key topics of interest, especially when I don’t have much time and want to get a grasp on things as quickly as possible.
This suggests that Memeorandum has established a beachhead that provides some degree of “editorial synthesis” using algorithms to leverage the distributed assets of expertise, writing skills and hyperlinks. But it also suggests that this beachhead can expand beyond tech and politics only to the extent that other subject matters are adequately covered in some forms of “conversational/community” media that are rich in hyperlinks and/or metadata (tags, recommendations, etc.).
What I’d like to see as a next step is some integration of what Memeorandum does with the syndication functions of RSS, and some customization tools. For example, I might like to receive a feed derived from the sources cited on Memeorandum (maybe a few times each day?) but customized based on the topics I’m most interested in and the “publishers” I most respect. These could be ordered based on Memeorandum’s algorithms, or I might prefer the order to be based on my own topic and author preferences.
While this particular step in the evolution of functionality probably wouldn’t reach the “ease of use” levels provided by Media 1.0 publishers, it seems that each step along the evolutionary path will help the transition to Media 2.0 models penetrate a little more deeply into the media consumption mainstream.
And while this evolution of the editorial function doesn’t directly address the important question of revenue models, Umair suggests some general possibilities when he says:
Consider a newspaper industry player who had invested along the new media value chain - in a microplatform, and a reconstructor; and who had also developed strong edge competences in making ads, publishing, and finding, writing, and checking stories plastic.
Such a player would be actively reshaping industry economics. By controlling microcontent, they would be exerting strong market power over buyers and suppliers. By being able to leverage new kinds of distribution - individualized ‘casts of microchunked content - they would be able to massively raise switching costs, as well as entry barriers. The net effect of such a player would be to capture much of the value that is shifting away from the core of the value chain, and towards the edge.
Mitch Shapiro at 1:00 PM|Comments(0)
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