Birth of Niche Authorship and Mass Amplification

Peter Rojas (gdgt.com), Adam Rugel (Trazzler)

Notes:

We’re in a time of wholesale and wrenching change for established media. The rise of social media has invalidated a lot of core premises for print. This is the so-called ‘democratization’ of media, which isn’t about democracy, but money and control.

And based on the indisputable whipsaw theory of economics, the amplitude of change hits the hardest at the end of the supply chain. So the ‘audience’ is the thing being obliterated here and now.

It seems to me that what is at work in social media in general and even more so in tightly focused projects like those that you two are involved in is an inversion of control and voice, from a top-down, 1:many broadcast dynamic to bottom-up and many:many. In our earlier conversations we talked about niche authorship and mass amplification, but for brevity today I will just call this bottom-up.

I have an suspiciously long list of questions I want to poke at, with the help of my co-consprirators, Peter Rojas and Adam Rugel. [Intros]

* I hate the term ‘user-generated content’ - it’s a lie. But there is no doubt that much of the heft ot today’s web is the result of widescale participation. This is true for your companies, guys. What are the primary motivations of these contributors? Are they out for money, or is it about extra-monetary intangibles? Are you guys being carried on the backs of a feudal underclass of blog serfs, exploiting their higher impulses?

* Are the best candidates for today’s media start-ups going to look like yours? If not, what other models look interesting? Do you have to adopt the shady mafia shakedown sales approach of Yelp to float this stuff?

* Does bottom-up media represent a new artisanal journalism? Can everyone become a story teller, spilling out the thread of their interactions with gear, restaurants, travel, food, and entertainment? Is this ‘living life out loud’ cheap exhibitionism? Are we heading to a world where people’s dreams are manufactured? Or is this a liberation from the glitz and spin of 20th century advertising?

* Bottom-up means social. People are interacting with other people — through solutions like Trazzler and gdgt — to triangulate on things that cost money, like travel and gear. Will transactions be embbed in this social matrix? Are you guys doing transactions, now, or plan to? Does this make you shills, or is this a better way to decide what to buy?

* What are the more established media going to do? What will Sports Illustrated or the New York Times look like in 5 years? Will this be like the explosion of TV into 500 channels with cable? Are we headed for millions of niche participatory media sites?

* What should we be worried about as individuals, and as a society, with this going on? What will we lose when we can each have a unique experience of media? Will this drive us apart or bring us together?