It seems that people have discovered a new hobby - talking about themselves online. And if uploading millions of pages every day about their ordinary lives and loves wasn’t enough – this rising legion of gonzo laureates are demanding their place in the sun. By all acounts, they are getting it. According to studies by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, nearly a third of US internet users read blogs. Eight million of these have created one of their own. The next phase, however, is even more interesting – distributed publicity.
As the old Zen saying goes, if a leaf falls in a forest does anyone notice? Certainly, a random post in the blogosphere could easily vanish without a trace unless you are jacked in via one of the growing number of online publicity groupings. What I have labelled 'distributed publicity' refers to the ability of a network to divide and direct its audience to relevant segments of user generated content, whether this be in the form of web postings, photos, gift wishlists or even classified advertisements. The viral quality of these networks, which rely on their own momentum to acquire more users is also very financially attractive compared to sites which require heavy marketing budgets. No wonder then that Google and Yahoo have placed such companies on the top of their shopping lists.
A good example of distributed publicity in action is the photo sharing site Flickr. Flickr is not only a clever software application to store and manage your photos - its use of social networking brings an immediate and relevant audience to your photo album who will offer feedback and become your own mini fan base. Similarly, while anyone these days can easily set up their own weblog, hitching your efforts to a network like Myspace will allow you to co-author content with a growing number of like-minded bloggers who will leave their own graffiti style commentary on your pages. The addictive quality of such services is not merely having access to a tool to write about your life, but rather interaction with an audience who will share it with you.
Of course, it is not just voyeuristic consumers who are playing the fame game. More sophisticated webloggers aiming for web celebrity status now offer syndication via customised RSS feeds, trackbacks which reveal what other sites are commentating on your posts, and weblog advertising networks such as Blogads. Forget office watercooler notoriety. Today’s Digerati are focused on their Technorati rating, which profiles the number of sources that link to their weblog. Fortunately, the payoffs are more than the trickle feed of click revenue from Google’s Adsense program. Well known professional bloggers are using their new found status to launch books, consulting and speaking services.
The network benefits of weblog publicity are very similar to the kinds of features economists identify when analysing the operation of markets and trading exchanges. Sites like eBay or Monster have worked incredibly well, largely at the expense of traditional newspaper classifieds, for the reason that they deliver a huge volume of active buyers and sellers. The rationale for participation is compelling. You can post the fact that you have a toaster for sale on your own website, but you are likely to get a much better response if that post is on an auction site with millions of potentially interested buyers. Not everyone thinks this will be the case for long.
Bob Wyman, who co-founded Pubsub, recently wrote an influential post recently which argued that a combination of search engines with ‘Structured Blogging’ will force many of today's web businesses to adapt or shut down. By structured data, Wyman was referring to means of including tags in web pages and blog postings which identify information for what it is, rather than just a bunch of searchable text. So a restaurant review, can be identified by a search engine as a “review” and aggregated appropriately. Similarly, a resume in your “about me” page could also be tagged, and then indexed by a headhunter as part of a recruitment search result.
People have been talking about the semantic web for almost as long as the non semantic one has been around. Arguably if better meta data existed, you wouldn’t need Google’s clever workaround of link popularity to find relevant content or a site like eBay to help sellers find buyers. But while on level such order seems irresistible, the highly distributed nature of the web makes enforcing compliance to formal content rules difficult and even undesirable. Further, while the structured data approach makes life easier for people who know what they are looking for, it doesn’t address the importance of passive communities of interest that collect around favoured content.
Most of the people who hang out on Flickr peering in on other people’s lives via their photo albums probably didn’t start the day with the search term “middle aged man in faded tracksuit doing washing”. But, if the subject happens to be one of your photo contacts chances are you will look at that photo even though you would have never have thought of doing so otherwise. In many ways the real magic behind the growing number of distributed publicity networks is the entertainment value of their randomness.
In the early days of the web, sites banded together in web rings and participated in banner exchange networks to cost effectively acquire traffic. The distributed publicity networks of today are very similar in philosophy but vastly more sophisticated in scope and execution. Search engines may eventually become smart enough to find exactly what you are looking for. In the meantime, most of us will continue enjoying accidentally stumbling on what we were not.
