Kudos to Tim and O'Reilly for the launch of their "Tools of Change for Publishing" conference which we will definitely find a way to attend... but I have to believe that Tim is going to take some grief for this comment:
Truth to power? Or a mistake that will cost O'Reilly attendees and $$ ? Or both?
We're holding the conference in San Jose rather than New York, because we believe that the future of publishing is being shaped in Silicon Valley.
As a silicon valley entrepreneur building a company that is challenging some of the assumptions about how publishing should work, I have to agree with Tim that I see more innovation in Silicon Valley then "back east." But on the other hand, that is normal -- we don't have an existing entrenched industry and business model to protect. Take the PC instead, and ask how much thinking is going on in Redmond about the future of the PC? If Vista is the yardstick, not much is the answer.
I spent much of last summer speaking with publishers about the Personal Bee and a vision of reader inclusion in the editorial process. These are smart capable people, and they understand where this future leads. But they are also bound by the chains of their existing businesses and find it hard to make changes to products that still, today, produce profits.
But the bigger issue for our nascent industry is that there are a group of people with ideas (here) and a group of people with money and audience (east coast). Having the conference here may mean that fewer of those people with money and audience will bring those assets to the people with ideas. And that would be a loss for the whole industry.
J-Lab, the institute for interactive media, has produced a fascinating report on citizen media:
Citizen Media: Fad or the Future of News
Here are their key takeaways:
* Citizen media is emerging as a form of bridge media, linking traditional media with forms of civic participation.
* No one size fits all; there are many models.
* Instead of being comprehensive sources of news, sites are forming as fusions of news and schmooze.
* Most citizen sites don’t use traditional metrics - unique visitors, page views or revenues - to measure their success.
* Success is often defined as impact on their community.
* Half of our respondents said their sites don’t need to make money to continue.
* Yet there are new kinds of media companies starting to emerge.
* There is a high degree of optimism that citizen news sites are here to stay.
* Finding ways to attract more contributors and some operating support are major challenges.'
The entire report is worth reading.
One of the biggest challenges for an aggregation engine, like The Personal Bee, is having sufficient content within a given vertical category to make for an interesting enough aggregated product. We have taken a big step forward this week in implementing feed level filtering -- so now, within a given Beehive, you can add feeds that might have only a little content of interest to your subject and make sure that you get only that content...
Local news aggregation has been one of the big problems for us -- either we have to choose too few blogs and we don't get enough of interest, or we expand the sources and get a lot of extraneous material. Filters solve this, by allowing us to define specifically the town we care about as a filter.
We have applied this idea to a first example -- Berkeley California (since that is where we are):
http://www.personalbee.com/berkeley%20buzz
Let us know what you think of the Berkeley Buzz!
I was doing some work on a new widget builder for the Bee (cool stuff on the way) and I happened to notice an article now 6 months old that I had tagged by Jack Shafer on Slate:
Newspapers are dying, but the news is thriving
Its a useful meme as we continue to discuss the way in which the world keeps changing out from under us... I have been exchanging emails with Shel Holz on the press release after his response to my post here:
http://personalbee.blogs.com/beeblog/2007/01/why_a_press_rel.html#comments
Press releases are dying, but information from companies about their products and services is thriving...
I will be speaking on March 9th at the Society for New Communications Research annual event, New Communications Forum in Las Vegas. Let me know if you will be at the event!