Charlene Li has a good post about a recent panel she participated on about social media in a traditional media context. She summarizes well, I think, with these words:
"...if you take the social computing view that as a publisher, you can't serve ALL of the needs of your customer yourself, then the best that you should do is to be the FIRST source of information for your audience. In that way, News.com ensures that although it may not be the ONLY source of technology news, it has a fighting chance of filtering and aggregating that news for its audience better than anyone else."
I think that's a great way to explain it. Li mentions Digg.com, for example, as an example of a media publisher that does not create or control content - yet provides added value and branding and thus has built huge loyalty in this new social media context.
This is along the same idea as John Palfrey's explanation of news reading habits in a new world that I highlighted yesterday. I think that refining the stories we can use to explain these new media to new participants will only help accelerate the truly social nature of the phenomena. That and being able to point to examples of social media that cover more than just tech. Commontimes.org is a digg clone of sorts about politics, for example.
On the role of publishers in a social media world
Reader Comments
(Page 1)2. Don't forget newsonwomen.com. This media site doesn't try to be first like news.com or to rank like digg, but to "reframe" the news and highlight the many women who are mentioned in articles, but rarely get the headline. In doing so it will hopefully create more opportunities for women in business, science, technology, education and the arts. How can women get better jobs if noone knows who they are?
Posted at 5:52PM on May 24th 2006 by Alice Krause
1. On the 'roll'? On the 'role', surely.
Posted at 5:10PM on May 23rd 2006 by stopsatgreen