802.11me

If All Content is Syndicated

Kevin Werbach talks about content syndication business models by way of a discussion re: Tim Bray's response to Clay Shirkey's attack on the semantic web. Some of this is pretty tedious, as arguments over hypothetical futures tend to be, but what is interesting to me is Kevin's final paragraph:

In a similar vein, I've spoken with several venture capitalists recently about Technorati and Feedster, two aggregation services for RSS feeds. The VCs see the buzz around blogs, syndication, and social networking. Yet they can't figure out function the aggregation services provide. The best argument I've been able to come up with is the following: Technorati and Feedster are on the path to the Semantic Web that actually works. They are attacking a very big problem -- the machine-readable Web -- by addressing small problems that are real and immediate.

The interesting models here are emerging and will soon present themselves in the form of some uber-aggregation offering that allows very disparate sources of information to come together in an interesting ways to reduce friction in one-to-one marketplaces for goods and services. What did I just say? I think that real competition to Ebay will come from this emerging environment; I think that the opportunity is huge and historic and people are starting to "get it". Will be interesting to see if Ebay, Google, and the like make the correct acquisitions along the way or whether they gobble up the wrong startups and let their next competitor slip through the gates.