Wednesday, January 12, 2005
Blogs Building the Next Media Empire
In my last post I asked "When will we see a whole news site composed only of blogs?" It's not far off, but I wanted to share a few sites I bumped into recently that are starting to do this for particular niche industries:
http://www.propolitics.com/
http://www.searchbrains.com/
http://www.prperspective.com/
These sites are lists of blog posts from bloggers around the web. They're targeted by niche. So what's missing here?
The first thing is meaningful organization on the page. If you look at a news site it's easy to see what's the most important story. It's at the top. The problem with blogs is that they don't allow any clear way to make a hierarchy of importance based on placement.
So what should they, and by they I mean iEntry, do with these sites? I think they should make them look more like webpronews. Though their main hierarchy now is date too... hm... I guess what I'm looking for is something with the look of WPN but more organization.
Within the searchbrains site why can't we break it up into ppc and organic, and then organic into onsite, offsite, and then just regular search news. Does a site that meaningfully organizes search blog writing in one place have a chance to get more traffic than the originators?
Could the searchbrains site, with organization and editing, get the traffic that would normally go directly to Beal and Battelle? Probably. Especially if they had a newsletter with the latest in search blog blab.
How does this relate to the free content frontier? Well, again, search brains and the others aren't paying for the content. They're just linking to it. And I can guarantee you could go to searchbrains right now and buy an ad. And I can guarantee you that the next major media empire will be one built of blogs (and probably a forum or two).
(I'd like to think I'm the first to talk of a blog empire, or even a news site composed only of blogs but I'm sure I'm not. So where are people talking about this? Show me the blog or website. Hell it's probably in that Time magazine article...)
http://www.propolitics.com/
http://www.searchbrains.com/
http://www.prperspective.com/
These sites are lists of blog posts from bloggers around the web. They're targeted by niche. So what's missing here?
The first thing is meaningful organization on the page. If you look at a news site it's easy to see what's the most important story. It's at the top. The problem with blogs is that they don't allow any clear way to make a hierarchy of importance based on placement.
So what should they, and by they I mean iEntry, do with these sites? I think they should make them look more like webpronews. Though their main hierarchy now is date too... hm... I guess what I'm looking for is something with the look of WPN but more organization.
Within the searchbrains site why can't we break it up into ppc and organic, and then organic into onsite, offsite, and then just regular search news. Does a site that meaningfully organizes search blog writing in one place have a chance to get more traffic than the originators?
Could the searchbrains site, with organization and editing, get the traffic that would normally go directly to Beal and Battelle? Probably. Especially if they had a newsletter with the latest in search blog blab.
How does this relate to the free content frontier? Well, again, search brains and the others aren't paying for the content. They're just linking to it. And I can guarantee you could go to searchbrains right now and buy an ad. And I can guarantee you that the next major media empire will be one built of blogs (and probably a forum or two).
(I'd like to think I'm the first to talk of a blog empire, or even a news site composed only of blogs but I'm sure I'm not. So where are people talking about this? Show me the blog or website. Hell it's probably in that Time magazine article...)
# posted by Garrett French @ 6:59 PM 
