Wednesday, June 11, 2003|
No eBay of blogs Jeff Jarvis delivers his threatened snark attack on Tony Perkins' Always-On non-blog site. Of course it's always in good taste to have a scuffle around the inevitable marketing-driven degradation of definitions, but here's the interesting bit of the post to me: Perkins talks about the "ebayization of media" -- that is, using the audience to let the big company make lots of money. But that's not happening here, Tony, first because bloggers are independent (and that is their charm and credibility), second because there is no big eBay ready to pull them together, and third because there's no way apparent for that big eBay of the people's media to make money from it .This is worth a little further comment. eBay's model is to "sell people to each other", and to extract revenue for the use of a database and reputation and transaction systems. eBay scales on the number of buyers and sellers in the market, the diversity of goods on offer, and the sales volume. eBay also fits a more general theme of many surviving dot-coms, that of leveraging content provided by the users themselves.
Could blogs fit this mold? Certainly 'users' provide the content. At this point there is damn-all money changing hands, Andrew Sullivan aside, so let's relabel those users from buyers/sellers to readers/writers. Can either be aggregated in any meaningful sense? On the reader side of the card, being How about the author side? It's questionable that aggregation is meaningful there either. If the largest hosting service, blogger, can become the target of a one man jihad, then the switching costs of moving between tools and sites are not as large as estimated by fearful bloggers or hopeful hosting entrepreneurs. And I have yet to see a meaningful way of getting audience, save the fickle finger of the Instapundit, and just plain perseverence. That leaves the 'market making' aspects of eBay, which does include things like search and reputation that serve to reduce overall transaction costs. We do have some partial equivalents in the blogosphere, from Technorati to the blogging ecosystem. These are all useful services, and I have no wish to denigrate the good folks providing them, but there's no money flowing. To the cynical VC's eye they look like features that will accrete onto search engines and/or hosting services pretty quickly.
This is more of an attempt at defeat in detail than Jarvis attempted, but I reach the same point: Sorry, Tony, no eBay for blogs (and what you have is a virtual Silicon Valley rag that's in no danger of evolving that way). |
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Keitai log
From the invaluable Japan Media Review, a weblog, in English, regarding the cultural and media aspects of mobile adoption in Japan. By a group of very observant and articulate college students. |
