the media revolution

Filed in archive Entrepreneurship on December 11, 2003

Loic plans to infect the World Economic Forum with the weblog virus. There have been so many clever thoughts it's hard top add something.

I totally agree with Loic's main thesis that weblogs have the potential to shape the world of media. I also share the increased pressure to stay cost competitive for traditional media. Weblogs create a new layer of media and will surely help the convergence of different media into a single medium (the biggest machine in the world- the internet).

However I feel the disruptive power of weblogs it's not like Napster and classical CDs. Music stays the same, Napster just changed the distribution and business models. If you have Napster, you throw away your CDs. If you have a weblogs, you start crawling newspapers and the web for content for your readers (without throwing away your morning press or your newspaper bookmarks).

Another difference, weblogs create the new aspects while enabling people to publish easily and therefore helping democracy and free flow of information. Weblogs add a completely new content, which has not been accessible before. This also creates much more confusion. Millions of bloggers have very distinct writing style and even one blogger often varies strongly in quality of their reporting from great inside knowledge to simple things. This is much different then high quality newspapers where a complete hierarchy of editors slows down the publishing process, but also secures a perfect quality all over the paper.

As long as there is no Google for weblogs (i.e. a good set of algorithms) it will be difficult for weblogs to reach a critical mass. Out of my personal experience things get difficult if you have more than 100 weblogs listed and read. If this occurs, the media revolution might be near....