. . . will content finally be king?

Manish Chandra over at TiE, has put together an interesting event Tuesday, July 26 in Santa Clara featuring Roger McNamee. Mr McNamee has had a midas touch over the past five years with investments at SilverLake Partners. And those years have been the toughest ever for Silicon Valley.

Also, Mr McNamee is very interested in new media which, happens to be an interest of mine also.

From the TiE pitch about the event:

The confluence of technology, new delivery mechanisms from podcasting to TV on the cell-phones is creating a revolution that remains only partially understood. It is changing how we create, consume and distribute entertainment. The emphasis on distribution technologies has overlooked the role of creation of content for the new media.

This touches on one of my favorite predictions: that we are reaching the point when finally, content will be king. Because creating content is difficult at a time when servers and algorithms are easy and plentiful. There are too many "tech" companies using servers and algorithms to make money from people produced content.

Indexing the content of blogs such as at BlogPulse, and aggregating news stories, such as at Google News, holds little value because anybody can do much the same thing reasonably well with some servers and software. Yet not anybody can create the content, such as news stories, gadget reviews, etc.

A page of links or headlines harvested by machines is cheaper to produce but those links have to point to something of value, otherwise there is nothing.

There must be considerably more value in content than in the index. Content can be controlled, it can be locked up or selectively syndicated. It all seems pretty obvious, or is my math wrong?

SIG- Internet "Legends in Internet & New Media: George Zachary Talks to Roger McNamee"