The publishing industry is the new technology industry
By Tom Foremski - January 24, 2006
[The following is a reply to a post by Dave Winer, the father of blogging, on his blog scripting.news, which doesn't accept comments, which is fine because we have hyperlinks :-) That's the beauty of the new media.)
Dave, your question is spot-on: "is the publishing industry the new technology industry?" Yes, the publishing industry is indeed, the new technology industry.
The publishing industry that has been forming the last few years is a technology-enabled publishing industry made up of technology-enabled media companies. It is not the publishing industry of the New York Times, or Dow Jones.
The first wave of technology-enabled media companies are corporations such as Yahoo, Google, AOL, Amazon, EBay, and Craigslist. They publish pages of content and advertising. Except that most of their content is obtained for as low cost as possible; it is harvested by servers and algorithms or their content is contributed by their communities of users, such as at EBay or Craigslist.
Content can also be spidered from other sites, collected, and spun into an index. Publishing the index provides Google and others with cheap content, much cheaper than the New York Times using its journalists to produce a page of content.
[BTW, my web site is spidered by 17 bots every day (a number that is increasing.) The bots suck up one third of my bandwidth and deliver about 5 per cent of my traffic. More than 90 percent of my readers come direct, they know where I live, which is a great position to be in and not have to rely on search engines for traffic. The bots slow down my server, so that means they must be slowing down the internet experience for millions of people as they visit sites like mine. I wonder how long that situation will last.]
Yahoo has tried to produce its own content in the past, such as its financial news channel, which was scrapped. And more recently, Yahoo has tried again and hired editors such as Patrick Houston from Cnet, to create some content in-house.
By and large, this first wave will give way to a second wave of technology-enabled media companies because of the effect of what I call "you can't get there from here." (This is a characteristic of all important transitions in industry.)
Obviously, the second wave of successful companies will not be any of the web 2.0 companies we read about--they all seem so very 1.5 . . . don't you think?
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January 24, 2006 | Permalink | Comment | Category: Mediasphere | Subscribe to SVW
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Comments (10)
I don't know, Tom -- first you call Yahoo and Google "technology-enabled media companies" but then you say they can't produce their own content because "you can't get there from here."
If they can't produce their own content, how do they qualify as media companies? It seems to me if they are just "obtaining" content through spidering or hosting, they're still tech companies.
Maybe what you're getting at is that folks like Google and Craigslist do a very rough form of editing -- in Google's case, by constantly tweaking their algorithm, or in Craiglist's case by constantly deleting crap.
Posted: January 24, 2006 8:47 AM
Ryan, they use technology to obtain content but they are still publishers. All publishers try to minimize their cost of business. If you obtain free, or nearly free content, and do it with machines instead of pesky people, then that's a good place to be. It's easier plugging in an extra server than hiring an extra body. . .
Posted: January 24, 2006 9:58 AM
Let's clear this up: Yahoo! directly creates its own content. See "Kevin Sites In the Hot Zone" and their recent creation of a financial journalism squadron (http://finance.yahoo.com/columnist/allbios).
Google doesn't directly create content (outside of the fact that everyone blogs 'em), but it repackages content to meet the needs of its audience (i.e. the "editing" concept discussed in the comment above).
To sum: Of course Internet companies are becoming the new publishers because the Internet is a more effective publishing medium.
The interesting question is my mind whether "qualitative" (Yahoo! creating proprietary content, taxonomy) will win out versus "quantitative" (algorithms, search, etc...). Qualitative content models have taken a beating, but I think they'll mount a late-game come-back as late-adopters migrate to broadband and seek out familiar content types (similar to newspapers, magazines and TV shows they now see).
Posted: January 24, 2006 10:44 AM
Tom,
Please clarify something for me. Are you equating publications such as the weekend print edition of the Financial Times or the print edition of The Sunday New York Times with, say news.google.com or the gigabytes of utterly unwatchable video dreck on video.google.com? I do feel you have such a general notion of "publish" and "content" as to make those words essentially meaningless.
Cheers,
Doug Turner
skype: dduuggllaa
Posted: January 24, 2006 11:29 AM
You could always use a robots.txt file to prevent the bots from getting to your content.
An aside: I wonder when bots will get smart enough to subscribe to RSS feeds--for sites that actually have RSS feeds, that is. Would be a better way to note when the site has been updated. It's in a single file with pointers to the Web address for where the real content lives and wouldn't take up so much bandwidth.
Posted: January 24, 2006 12:39 PM
A lot of those services are how people discover you in the first place. After awhile, they become regular readers so fall in to your "direct" bucket...
Posted: January 24, 2006 4:14 PM
rogue bots won't obey robots.txt
Posted: January 27, 2006 11:53 AM
weird question. Of course the publishing industry is the new technology industry and why would you differ in the first place?
Posted: March 11, 2006 11:11 AM
Well! Some people arround here are not smart enough to read through the article and understand it properly. Ha-ha!
Posted: March 16, 2006 10:19 AM
It is not about smarts, it is about using and doing. You get a different perspective, but eventually everybody will get it...
Posted: March 16, 2006 10:13 PM