People love bandwagons. One of the popular memes at the moment, re-invigorated by some bloke called Rich Skrenta, the CEO of Topix.net, is about “The Failure of We (the) Media”. Anil Dash jumped on it. Even Ben Barren jumped on it.
Are these people living on the same planet I am? The one with 60 million blogs, squillions of YouTube videos and tens of thousands of podcasts? And it’s still the dawn of time as far as new media is concerned. Talking about the failure of “We Media” in 2007 is like the mental midgets who were talking about the failure of the internet to live up to the hype in 2001.
Thank Darwin Chris Anderson gets it.
Every day I get most of my news from blogs. I don’t visit “news sites” or use a “news aggregator”. I use a generic feedreader (Bloglines) and a totally idiosyncratic RSS subscription list that includes everything from personal posts from friends to parts (but not all) of the WSJ. When it comes to the web, I have no interest in someone else trying to guess what I want to read or “help” me by defining what’s news and what isn’t. My news is not your news; indeed, you probably wouldn’t call most of it news at all. I will probably never visit any of the sites Skrenta mentions, and never did visit the ones that are now defunct. In short, We Media is alive and well. It’s just the would-be We Media institutions that are not. A phenomenon is not necessarily a business. That doesn’t make it any less of a phenomenon.
Paul Montgomery – I see he lists TinFinger as one of the “We Media” businesses that failed? Does he know something I don’t?
No, we’re one of those “present perfect” businesses Rich talks about: “They haven’t yet succeeded…”
“Are these people living on the same planet I am? The one with 60 million blogs, squillions of YouTube videos and tens of thousands of podcasts?”
Heh… as someone who’s been blogging for about 8 years, and who has been the first employee of Six Apart as we’ve helped millions of people start blogging, I’m *keenly* aware of this planet.
What I was commenting on (and Chris and I have cleared up a bit in his comments) was that the model of trying to fit “we media content” into old-media-style buckets hasn’t really been hugely successful thus far. I was really just thinking out loud, taking notes for a post I’m writing. Hope that helps clear things up.
Fair enough Anil. I’ve been reading you for at least half of the time you’ve been blogging mate. And I know you’re a wicked smart guy. The key points here, as you’ve pulled out, are that:
a) the new media businesses WON’T look like the old media businesses. Trying to retrofit the new businesses into the old models is the same mistake we always make in new paradigms. Forgivable but to be avoided.
b) “thus far”. As you know, it’s VERY early days from the commercial side of things. This is a ten year (or more) journey. Major paradigm shifts always take longer than the people involved in creating them want them too but not as long as the people on the outside think they will.
Say hi to Mena for me.