A-listers are irrelevant
One of the key asset of coComment – the company I am currently helping spin out of Swisscom – is the fact that the service works across different silos that are emerging on the web. It is important because there isn’t ONE blogosphere anymore: there is a Technorati sphere (the most famous), a mySpace sphere, a Skyblog sphere, a Flickr sphere, a Digg sphere, etc…
All these social platforms are independent worlds with different opinion leaders, values, histories, and nobody can consolidate what is REALLY happening in global conversation because nobody can see through all these worlds at the same time.
One consequence is that, on a global scale, a-listers are less significant than they used to. And the reason is not themselves. These guys are still as good and relevant as before. It is just that the a-listers’ kingdom (i.e. the Technorati blogosphere and it’s 47 million websites) is weighting less in relative terms. One single fact: MySpace’s 90 million users are not included in Technorati.
Need another proof? Check this out.
Pete Cashmore has the shocking news: Flickr is irrelevant! The photo sharing website that we bloggers have been using and praising for the past years is in fact a non-factor on the global market.
Let’s do a quick search on Technorati. 23’189 bloggers with a lot of authority talked about flickr. Only 2’724 about Photobucket. 9 times less blog posts, but 7 times more market share.
What happened? The online planet has moved past the blogosphere as the only place where conversation happens. Blogs and a-listers are relevant, but they aren’t the only conversation going on anymore. It’s about time we start thinking bigger.
Conclusions?
• Stop bothering Scoble, Hugh, Arrington and co about links. They can only get you 25’000 irrelevant users anyway (I’m trying hard to free your inboxes guys, don’t hit me too hard ;-).
• The pulse of the global conversation is NOT Technorati. Technorati will give you hints of what early adopters think, not what the global population thinks. We should all search Technorati but also mySpace, Google News, Skyblog for the French market, Digg, YouTube, etc…
• We need a live web search engine, one that does what Technorati does but on a global scale.
July 3rd, 2006 at 6:15 pm
Totally agree with the gist here, although Technorati does include MySpace blogs (it’s a recent addition). However, very few MySpace users seem to use the blog tool.
July 3rd, 2006 at 6:15 pm
Totally agree with the gist here, although Technorati does include MySpace blogs (it’s a recent addition). However, very few MySpace users seem to use the blog tool.
July 3rd, 2006 at 6:30 pm
I agree that there is a next phase coming. See: Relevance Vs? Democratization
At RTM, we are piloting a live correlation engine that matches “any” published RSS item to your preferences. That enables you to enlarge the universe of publishers without incurring information overload. It also enables relevant publications to bubble to the top, which would not make it through the page-ranking logic of aggregation sites.
July 3rd, 2006 at 6:30 pm
I agree that there is a next phase coming. See: Relevance Vs? Democratization
At RTM, we are piloting a live correlation engine that matches “any” published RSS item to your preferences. That enables you to enlarge the universe of publishers without incurring information overload. It also enables relevant publications to bubble to the top, which would not make it through the page-ranking logic of aggregation sites.
July 4th, 2006 at 9:29 am
Jeff: what’s funny here is that blogs were, originally, an answer to information overload. Metafilter, memepool, boingboing, all these sites were a way to filter what was relevant to you from a network that was becoming too large. The Yahoo directory was getting out of hands, the cool site of the day useless… The web was growing.
Now we again have too many filters, so we need to filter the filters… Amazing :-)
July 4th, 2006 at 9:29 am
Jeff: what’s funny here is that blogs were, originally, an answer to information overload. Metafilter, memepool, boingboing, all these sites were a way to filter what was relevant to you from a network that was becoming too large. The Yahoo directory was getting out of hands, the cool site of the day useless… The web was growing.
Now we again have too many filters, so we need to filter the filters… Amazing :-)
July 7th, 2006 at 12:04 am
Really good point Peter, and I love the corrolation of the number of blog mentions, very funny. But, in my mind there is a difference between sheer numbers of users and actual creation of value. If it all comes back to “eyeballs” then where is the real revolution. IMHO flickr provides a much richer framework for “co-creation” of value, and is building value that goes above and beyond the incremental eyeballs.
One of my concerns with myspace, is that they do not seem to be building value above and beyond the eyeballs that they are aggrigating. In the end those eyeballs are as likely to move on to the next big thing.
July 7th, 2006 at 12:04 am
Really good point Peter, and I love the corrolation of the number of blog mentions, very funny. But, in my mind there is a difference between sheer numbers of users and actual creation of value. If it all comes back to “eyeballs” then where is the real revolution. IMHO flickr provides a much richer framework for “co-creation” of value, and is building value that goes above and beyond the incremental eyeballs.
One of my concerns with myspace, is that they do not seem to be building value above and beyond the eyeballs that they are aggrigating. In the end those eyeballs are as likely to move on to the next big thing.