Blogosphere: The biggest, best beige box of all

One of the reasons I started Squash was so I could better understand the blogosphere. You see, I’m a media tragic. I spend every day of my working life analysing, critiquing, exploring media and how it works. So I thought it was kind of hypocritical for me to be opining on blogs and how they’re going to impact other media when I’d never run one.

I’m certainly glad, I decided to kick off Squash, because I think I’ve already got an infinitely superior understanding to what I had previously.

 For example, had I written a blog at the start of this week on monetising blogs, I would have talked about building a community and gone on to espouse how blogs need to look for new ways to monetise those communities. I still think a lot of blogs, particularly your very niche ones, are going to have to evolve into mini-portals whereby bloggers plug into all manner of widgets and services like social networking tools, specialist search capabilities, e-commerce services and so on into their websites so that they more effectively interact with their communities thereby opening up more opportunities to monetise. That’s what’s happening in traditional media. I haven’t talked to a single media company in the last three years and not had them tell me that they’re wanting to diversify their revenue streams and will examine every possible way of milking every last revenue-generating opportunity out of the community they have built via their core product. I’ll still write a blog on this next week, but I’ll be coming from an entirely different point of view.

What I’ve really come to understand during my four-day blogging career, is a lot of blogs, particularly those that operate in broader, mass-appeal areas like tech, is that their core asset is not a community. The community is “owned” by the collective blogosphere, not any one particular blog. So what is the blog’s core asset then? I think it’s the knowledge, reputation and credibility of the blog’s operator.

Therefore, what needs to be monetised then, is not the blog, but the blogger.
 
There are obvious routes here. Speaking engagements, external writing gigs, etc. Boring. Let’s think outside the square, for a second.

I personally think we’ve gone too far in expecting computers to do all our aggregating, filtering, selection of content. As an old editor, I’ll back my ability to outperform any computer in this regard and I don’t care how friggin good you reckon your algorithm is. Given the right set of tools that make it easy to select and position content, I’d be pretty confident I could out-Google News, Google News and out-memeorandum, memeorandum. 

I believe they way to get the best possible results is with man and machine working together. 

Let me give you an example. I run a sort-of-blog/news site for the football team I follow down here in Australia, the Parramatta Eels. As part of that I aggregate and summarise every news item I manage to find on the team. Google News Alerts are a god-send in helping me to track that content. I tag all that content by player, match and so forth, so if you came to my site and look up a certain player you’ll get an infinitely superior set of results than if you typed that player’s name into any search engine. 

Even more so, if you wanted to know the best 10 sites to visit to keep up to date with the Parramatta Eels, I could deliver you a much better set of results than you’d get with Google/Yahoo/MSN/etc. 

Now wouldn’t it be a good idea for a search engine to make use of this kind of knowledge that’s out there in the blogosphere to influence it’s search results. If I could do a search on Parramatta and as a trusted influencer, drag and drop results around from a search page, bin irrelevant links and add obvious missing pages, and the search engine learned from that and it subsequently influence all related searches, now wouldn’t that be a bloody powerful search tool. The search engine would of course, pay the blogger-cum-trusted influencer a commission on all related search results, giving said blogger another revenue stream on top of their AdSense/advertising revenue. All we’ve done here is just found another way to leverage off the same expertise that we’ve already ascertained is the blogger’s core asset.

It’s not that hard to imagine ways you could apply similar principles to social networking, e-commerce, etc. In actual fact, I’d argue that memeorandum employs this exact process in its aggregation activities, as it uses the reputation of its “white list” of bloggers to influence who it’s monitoring and how highly stories rate.

It appears to be all the rage to try and build the smartest possible big, beige box that you just stick in the corner and magically it generates money. But I’d posit the blogosphere, if it can be effectively tapped into, is almost certainly the smartest, big beige box of all.

Filed under: Blogs, Search