Inchoate Curmudgeon

A friend and colleague of mine, Art Raymond, taught me several years ago that the revolution of Web media could be best understood in terms of the three major value propositions that mainline media covet:

• The Channel
• The Content
• The Editing

The channel is the actual medium that is the vehicle for the message: the newspaper, the magazine, the network, the radio station. The content is the articles, the programming, the writing, the editorial, the cartoons. The editing is more subtle, but critical. The editing is the effort required to tune the other two to the audience that is interested.

No one “owns” the Web. The “content” on the Web mostly competes well with what you can find in traditional media. But what is there on the Web now to really deal with drinking through the Web fire hose?

The biggest single problem with the Web is that it is just too much. The time you can spend finding what is interesting to you can be overwhelming. There is plenty of content, but how do you get to what you are interested in as quickly as possible? (Or at least before you get so distracted you digress and forget what you were looking for, but I digress.)

Although portals have always had the technical capability to re-purpose and target content to an individual or group, how do you get the right content to the right audience? Most of us have tried at least one of these portals. The only public portals that ever worked have a proactive staff that seeks the right content for the audience, and for the portal. But this takes effort, and staff, is expensive and is decidedly “unweblike” in its lack of revolutionary “turn the world inside out” sort of approach that makes it on the Web.

It’s impossible to say yet if Digg is the thing that will provide the Web 2.0 inside-out replacement for traditional editing, but I think my friend Russ is on the right track that Digg is something worth spending time to understand.

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