Re: [syndication] Re: very basic question

[hpyle@agora.co.uk]

> I understand that some thousand people are now doing syndication.
> Whats missing to make this a real mass medium?

My take:  consumption is still much easier than production.  That will change, and then syndicated self-produced content will be a very big deal.

It's easy to find RSS newsfeeds and produce a "Daily Me" for your own consumption.  With any of HeadlineViewer, Radio Userland, Amphetadesk et al this is an incredibly low learning curve.  It's spreading by word of mouth (eg. I recommend Radio to other people in the office, and slowly they start to depend on it).  

What percentage of those readers are also publishing syndicated weblogs or lists themselves?  1%? Probably way less.  Almost an invisibly small number.  Userland are pushing this forward, but it's still really hard / takes too much effort.  

Some people believe that the read/write ratio is important and want to see it approach 1:1.  Userland, Groove, the "p2pj" community.  Because the Web (publishing-side) is broken with NAT, I'm not sure the two-way-web approach will overcome the usability barriers to publishing;  at least, not without some central content switches (such as Userland is providing with ourfavouritesongs).  There isn't an industry around content switching, but when you recognise that Akamai, Ariba, Userland, Napster and Hailstorm are all doing fundamentally the same thing with different flavors of content, this starts to look interesting.

It's well known that I'm placing some bets on Groove being critical to that content-switching infrastructure.  And, that RSS (with all its faults) is a good format.  When production is as easy as consumption and when content-switching rendezvous points are in place, Reed's law kicks in and syndication will explode.


-Hugh

hpyle@agora.co.uk       | +44 (0)20 8783 3592
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