As the year comes to an end I thought I would share some fairly random (but hopefully coherent and interesting) observations and ramblings that have been on my mind.
The fractionalization of media and information continued unabated in 2007.
It would be great to believe that the bounty of social media threw off more light than heat, and resulted in a truly efficient and rational marketplace of ideas – one in which the worthy stories received sufficient attention and benefited from crowdsourced reportage, and in which stories that might not have previously had a chance were aired.
Some of that may have happened, but there was an awful lot of "heat" thrown off as well. We have a reality in which it is hard to find the winners.
With democratization of media, the vaunted fourth estate is eroding as a separate and esteemed institution.
It is true that more people than ever can have their voices heard, but the flip side and unavoidable reality it that there is so much din; who is really listening and can they hear you above the noise?
Thus, people and companies who seek to make news and promote issues, products and services have a hard time figuring out the impact of their messages when attention is so divided.
What, really, is the value of a minor mention these days even if it is in a major traditional media property or blog?
It seems that in this attention driven economy, the attention rich got richer and vice versa. The "big" stories received outsized coverage and attention while everyone else fought over the remaining crumbs.
Perhaps then, the winners were information consumers? In some ways yes, although it is arguably getting harder rather than easier to find the right information and vet sources.
It will be interesting to see what comes out of this Petri dish in the coming months and years.
The companies that can figure out how to help people make sense out of info – to gather info, sift and separate the good from the bad – and do this well – will be successful. Indeed, we have seen the rise of meta sites like
Digg,
TechMeme,
StumbeUpon and
PopURLS, among others.
I also feel that we are in the early years of the rise of social networks as the killer application – a space that which will continue to grow, eventually subsuming other areas like media, search, marketing and even make headway in the enterprise, giving rise to social applications.
