I’ve Said Too Much

Not so much a paradigm shift as an interesting diversion (I mean, Google’s been auctioning ad space for years), here’s the auction for advertising slots on Rocketboom. I wonder if anyone will be foolhardy enough to write a valuation story at the end of this? And how on earth are they going to stop auction spam?

I hadn’t come across the works of Umair Haque and Bubblegen before Scott Karp pointed to this amazing presentation on the economics of Media 2.0. I’ve only just started trying to absorb it, but already I’m hooked. It deals in pretty plain terms with the fundamental matters of production and attention, and has some fascinating ideas about how attention is mediated by media in a networked landscape. When I find the time I’ll try and absorb it more completely.

The Ricky Gervais podcast on GU is now officially a meme - cf, this article on design by Joel on Software:

Oh, also, it needs to be pretty small, because otherwise it’s going to take up room on the sidewalk, forcing the pedestrians to squeeze past each other, which, possibly, when the Effete Yuppie Listening to His iPod gets distracted by a really funny joke on the Ricky Gervais podcast and accidentally brushes against the Strangely Haunted Vietnam-Era Veteran, can result in an altercation of historic proportions.

Who said comedy doesn’t cross borders?

There is something faintly ludicrous about the BBC rushing out a press release on their podcast downloads in response to the Guardian’s announcement that the Ricky Gervais podcast topped two million downloads earlier this week. Surely they can’t be feeling the pressure, can they?

It’s even more faintly ludicrous that the announcement is worded in such a way as to make it seem like the BBC podcasts are leading the world:

Almost two million BBC radio podcasts were downloaded during December, with the corporation’s breakfast programmes the most popular with listeners.

Radio 1’s Chris Moyles topped the chart with his show downloaded 446,809 times. Radio 4’s Today came in second place.

Mark Kermode’s film reviews from Five Live and Chris Evans’ Best Bits from Radio 2 were also in the top 10.

Well, OK, they “topped the chart” of BBC downloads. But, as I’ve said before, our podcast beat all the BBC podcasts down and was the number one podcast in the UK and US in both December and January.

But enough carping (well, there might be a little more carping later on, we shall see). The BBC numbers are quite interesting in their own right. Two million podcast downloads in December compares with about a million downloads for the Gervais podcast in the same month - so, one single podcast did half the traffic of all the BBC podcasts combined.

Apart from reconfirming Ricky’s world-shattering status, this also seems to suggest that the total number of downloads of UK content was between four or five million in December (assuming a longish tail of one to two million UK podcasts which were neither BBC nor Guardian Unlimited). Of course, a lot of that content was downloaded by people outside the UK, so God knows what the UK market for podcasts is - maybe half of the total, maybe a bit less.

Waving my hands in the air desperately, let’s say half those downloads went to UK punters, and each punter downloaded three individual podcasts in December. That would suggest a total UK podcast market of individuals of around 650,000 to 800,000 individual punters. Seeing that number written down makes me think my assumptions are wrong, because it seems on the high side, but maybe not. For comparison, Radio 4’s UK reach is about nine million people, Radio 5 is 6 million, BBC 7 (the BBC’s digital speech station) is 631,000 (all these figures are based on numbers for Q3 2005). So, my recklessly inaccurate estimate suggests that podcasting as a whole in the UK is now equivalent to a successful national digital radio network.

Being mischievous based on these numbers (which, I stress again, are completely reckless), I reckon the BBC used about 5 gigs of bandwidth to serve their podcasts to non-UK punters. Hope to see that broken out in the next set of published accounts….

Scott Karp’s written a great post on whether media is a commodity. By media, he means “media space”, ie, advertising. He’s riffing on a MediaPost report to the effect that eBay has pitched the idea of a media buying exchange to - get this - the Association of National Advertisers.

So can eBay (or someone) build a truly efficient electronic marketplace for media, which could further open up the game to content creators of every size and shape (i.e. bloggers and the like)? Only if the Big Advertisers are willing to play, and that will only happen if there is some industry standard for evaluating the options, i.e. which stock should I invest in? Brand-building advertisers with long purchase horizons (e.g. luxury cars) can’t buy based on clicks, so the Google model isn’t going to work for the whole market.

What technology companies don’t understand about advertising and media is that audience matters - that’s what advertisers are buying. And context matters, especially when it comes to brands. Whoever can come up with an efficient way to factor reliable measurements for audience and context into an electronic marketplace for media buying will have the next AdWords (and all the cash that goes with it).

Scott’s written some good stuff recently as a corrective to the algorithm-drenched hysteria of Web 2.0. I think what he’s said here is right too - you just can’t measure everything, and one of the key things you can’t measure is an audience’s relationship to its media. And if you can’t measure it, you can’t sell ads on it in anything like a mechanical way. And if you can’t sell in a mechanical way, you end up hiring human beings who pitch to clients and draw up readership surveys and explain “brand effects” and other such dark arts. In other words, traditional media sales.

These things are important to clients and, I believe, will continue to be so. Which isn’t to say we couldn’t do it better. Panel-based measurement will get better and more integrated with “mechanical” data as we move forward. But anyone who thinks that we’ll end up with a completely measurable advertising industry just doesn’t understand advertisers or audiences. It’s always going to be a bit messy, I’m afraid.

Russell Beattie has had enough of blog sensationalism - by which he means the tendency of the blogosphere to become more strident in its tone, and more extreme in its attitudes, as more and more bloggers come online:

Digg.com is a perfect example of this effect at work, but contained one site. I’ve been keeping track of their front page links recently because of all the buzz the site has gotten, and I have to say, it’s really full of crap. No really - the site is nicely designed, and the system is interesting, but the links produced are pure garbage. It seems that the ranking system they’ve created ends up promoting only the most sensationalist headlines to the front page. Pretty much if the title to an article doesn’9t have a least three exclamation points, it doesn’t get promoted.

I added this comment to his post:

I think you’re completely right. The way things stand, the Web is in danger of turning into a gigantic bulletin board where quiet, considered points of view just get drowned out in a wave of binary attitudes and point-scoring. Sites like digg.com, while great in theory, are in practice just acting as feedback mechanisms that cause the most extreme views to percolate upwards. You rightly point out that there may be technical solutions to some of these problems, but I also think people are going to start to value human interaction more and more, which will mean some kind of human editing (disclaimer: I work for Guardian Unlimited, so this is horribly self-serving). Web 2.0 is about lots of great things, but I haven’t seen it giving a cogent voice to the mob - yet.

See my earlier post: 50 users v 1 Editor.

Simon urged me to read Dan Gillmor’s open letter to the Bayosphere community, and I’m very glad he did. It’s a trenchant and honest account of why the experiment “failed” (although, to be fair to Dan, I’d say that failure is pretty provisional at the moment.

In the post, Dan highlights some key lessons he learned. I think several of them are directly and practically applicable to anyone planning “community participation” of any kind on their site (Washington Post, take note):

# Citizen journalism is, in a significant way, about owning your own words. That implies responsibilities as well as freedom. We asked people to read and agree to a “pledge” that briefly explained what we believed it meant to be a citizen journalist — including principles such as thoroughness, fairness, accuracy and transparency. Although some cynics hooted that this was at best naive, we’re convinced it was at least useful.

# Limiting participation is not necessarily a bad idea. By asking for a valid e-mail address simply in order to post comments, you reduce the pool of commenters considerably, but you increase the quality of the postings. And by asking for real names and contact information, as we did with the citizen journalists, you reduce the pool by several orders of magnitude. Again, however, there appears to be a correlation between willingness to stand behind one’s own words and the overall quality of what’s said.

# Tools matter, but they’re no substitute for community building. (This is a special skill that I’m only beginning to understand even now.)

# Although the participants — citizen journalists and commenters — are essential, it’s even more important to remember that publishing is about the audience in the end. Most people who come to the site are not participants. They’re looking for the proverbial “clean, well-lighted place” where they can learn or be entertained, or both.

Audience, community, rules and tools. Audience, community, rules and tools. It has a nice metre to it, and it’s essential to remember it.

This is one of those mornings when it seems almost impossible to add anything to the sheer wealth of stuff that’s already been said, so on the big issues of the day I have only this: if you think Yahoo! is actually giving up on search based on one quote taken out of context, you’re actually being stupid (shame on you Steve Rubel and well said Caterina Fake and Thomas Hawk), and the most exciting suggestion I’ve seen about Disney buying Pixar is the possibility of a link-up between ESPN and iTunes - but that’s because I’m guilty of forgetting that Disney is buying Pixar, not Apple. They ain’t the same, people, and if Jobs lets Apple get tied in to one Hollywood studio above all others he’ll be making a big mistake.

And on Google’s decision to cooperate with the Chinese government I am so profoundly conflicted that it makes my head hurt.

Now it gets interesting. Google News has finally come out of beta (see Battelle and Search Engine Watch).

So now we can have the row I’ve always wanted to have. How much is all that juicy content on Google News worth to Google, and how much is a presence on Google News worth to content publishers? How transparent will that relationship be?

I don’t anticipate a cavalcade of publishers crashing down Google’s doors and insisting that their content be removed from Google News. What I do expect is that, over the medium term, publishers are going to get savvier and savvier about what their presence on Google is worth to them - in terms of audience, and in terms of traffic which can be effectively monetised. We’ve not got the tools to be able to measure that, although we probably haven’t got the time - online publishers are still leaner than their offline brethren.

But as ad revenues grow, expect more and more data miners to be employed, because that’s how you really make your advertising effective. And one day at a major online publisher somewhere in the world, a data miner is going to go into their boss’ office and say “you know what? I’ve run the numbers, and it looks like we might be better off outside the Googlesphere than inside it. The people who come to us from Google, well, they just don’t click on ads, and our research shows they don’t even notice them. But the people who come in through our front page, our core audience, they do click on ads, and they’re just subsidising this other traffic.” And the data-miner’s manager, who’s at a crossroads in his career and wants to make a big statement, looks out of the window and makes a decision. To opt out of Google.

Sure, this is stupid. It probably won’t happen. But as ads start to appear on Google News (as I assume they’ll do as it comes out of beta) this discussions are bound to start. PaidContent reckons ads in Google News won’t “create as much heat” because of things like Topix.net which are already doing this. But those things are actually quite controversial, and, well, this is Google.

This is interesting: Ross Levinsohn has told the BBC that MySpace is going to launch a UK version:

n an interview with the BBC News website, Mr Levinson said the first priority of the new site would be the UK music scene.

“Clearly the first place to go is music, so we will tap into the music scene,” he said.

“We’re already working in the US with CD:UK which is coming over to the US, to be called CD:USA, and we’re going to integrate bands from MySpace into that programme.

“We hope when we go back to the UK to tap into how successful that show is. Hopefully they’ll want to market through MySpace and we’ll tap into the local events scene, parties, clubs, artists, film makers, television producers, so I think it’s going to grow pretty rapidly.”

Mr Levinson said News Corporation would be using the other properties it owns in the UK such as The Sun and The Times newspapers and Sky Television to promote the UK version of MySpace.

He said the site was particularly attractive to advertisers because its users are overwhelmingly aged between 16 and 34 years old, an age bracket companies are keen to target.

This is interesting for two reasons. It’ll be fascinating to see how News Corp leverages its UK assets to promote the new site. But it’ll be equally fascinating to see what “localisation” will mean to News Corp. and to MySpace. In my experience, localising an existing US asset which already has a lot of UK users is tricky and occasionally frustrating, particularly if the US site is functionally richer than the UK one. Incentivising people to move from one platform to another is virtually impossible.

PaidContent points to the rumours swirling around a potential sale of the Financial Times:

Research published by Morgan Stanley says the paper could fetch about $1.2 billion and values its website, FT.com, at about $355 million.

Last I hear, ft.com had around 90,000 paying subscribers. I don’t know what share of their revenue comes from non-subs, I’d assume less than 20 per cent. But that valuation looks pretty steep given those subscriber numbers.

There’s a great post here from Amr Awadallah speculating that Google’s Q4 numbers might not be so great because of changes it made to its search engine advertising monetisation in Q3:

These changes led Google to a very strong Q3 where they showed a sequential growth of 14% over Q2 of 2005, a very strong increase for a typically slow summer quarter. That, however, sets the standard very high for Q4 of 2005, hence my prediction that they will miss the wallstreet estimates for Q4 sequential growth. I monitored their UI closely in Q4 and did not see any significant monetization changes to boost Q4 ala what happened with Q3.

In fact, Google admitted that fact in an Nov 2005 SEC filing which stated: “seasonal trends in the third quarters of 2005 and 2004 may have been disguised by certain monetization improvements to our advertising programs.”

Looks like Amr’s been doing a fair amount of Google deconstruction on his blog. Have a read around.

One important thing to remember if you’ve got anything resembling a “corporate” blog: if you say nothing, you’re saying a lot. Compare the fact that the Yahoo! Search blog has not been updated since January 12, despite the DOJ data brouhaha covered in the previous post, with MSN’s concise but informative response to the whole kerfuffle.

Once the channel is open, it stays open - whether you like it or not.

In my ongoing campaign to think the unthinkable (see previous posts on DRM and community media), I’ve been thinking about the privacy implications of the US Department of Justice’s request that the major search engines provide information on their indexes and what people have been searching for. The DOJ has apparently asked Yahoo!, Google, AOL and MSN to provide two things: a random set of a million or so search queries; and a random set of a million or so pages from their index. For a good round-up, check Newsweek’s Technology: Searching for Searches.

Apparently, Yahoo!, AOL and MSN have passed this data over to the DOJ, and are arguing that this was fine, since there was no personally identifiable info anywhere in the data - ie, the DOJ couldn’t have figured out what any individual had searched for by looking at the data. Google, though, is “vigorously opposing” any effort to hand over the info. It’s getting plaudits (from John Battelle, among others) for fighting its corner.

But again I smell butter and sugar, and we know that makes fudge. Because Google isn’t doing this for any ethical reasons, as it’s being given some credit for. It’s doing it for good old-fashioned legal and commercial reasons - specifically, that the case the DOJ is fighting and for which it wants the data has nothing to do with Google, and therefore, for good old-fashioned commercial reasons, Google isn’t going to comply. It wants to keep its data secret. So the irony is that Google is getting praise for protecting privacy when all it’s doing is being secretive.

“Privacy advocates” are meanwhile criticising the DOJ and the compliant search engines. They’re apparently using the “thin end of the wedge” argument. This from the Newsweek piece:

Though the government intends to use these data specifically for its COPA-related test, it’s possible that the information could lead to further investigations and, perhaps, subpoenas to find out who was doing the searching. What if certain search terms indicated that people were contemplating terrorist actions or other criminal activities? Says the DOJ’s Miller, “I’m assuming that if something raised alarms, we would hand it over to the proper [authorities].” Privacy advocates fear that if the government request is upheld, it will open the door to further government examination of search behavior. One solution would be for Google to stop storing the information, but the company hopes to eventually use the personal information of consenting customers to improve search performance. “Search is a window into people’s personalities,” says Kurt Opsahl, an Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney. “They should be able to take advantage of the Internet without worrying about Big Brother looking over their shoulders.”

Well, yes, it’s possible, but an awful lot of things are possible. But what if we turned this argument on its head? Wouldn’t it be good for society in general if everyone’s searches were available online (in an anonymised fashion, of course). Wouldn’t that oil the wheels of commerce, grease the efficiency of the free markets, and transform the nature of democracy? If I could see, quickly and at a glance, exactly what the world was searching for and thinking about, wouldn’t that be a good thing for the human race?

Of course it would. But it won’t happen. Not because of high-minded virtue or ethics. Because that kind of data is increasingly the stuff which new economy corporate values are built on. Google’s business model depends on matching advertisers with searchers, and it uses complex algorithms and extensive data-mining to do that effectively. Force Google to hand over its data, in whatever form, and you hit it directly where its main pain centre is: in its market valuation. Search data is the oxygen that the Google organism needs to breathe. So let’s not talk about privacy and high-minded morality, and let’s recognise Google’s stance for what it is: capitalism, red in tooth and claw.

There’s a good, if very high-level, interview with Channel 4 chief exec Andy Duncan in New Media Age this week. Nuggets include:

• Duncan is still threatening to bring conventional and digital media production in-house if broadcasters and indie producers can’t reach agreement on digital exploitation rights for traditional programming.
• Channel 4 has “major ambitions to move into video on demand” in 2006
• “Linear TV channels will continue to be incredibly important for at least the next ten years.” Meaning they won’t be after 15 years, then?
• Channel 4 will launch an online channel, 4Laughs, to sit alongside the documentary channel FourDocs it launched last year. It will also develop the Slash Music portal.
• Again online, the company is “looking to do some exciting things in film that will build on the heritage of Film Four.”
• New media budgets have been increased by a third for 2006, on top of a “big increase” in 2005.
• Channel Four is pulling back from “red button” interactive TV. “We’re categorically saying that interactive TV is not a priority”.

Top Ten Sources was down when I tried to look at it this morning, but when I looked yesterday it certainly seemed a nice idea: pick a topic, then get a human being to find the best 10 blogs out there on that topic, and aggregate them.

The reason this has been controversial, of course, is copyright. Some bloggers are saying that Top Ten Sources violates their copyright when it aggregates blogs together. The response to this (from Dave Winer, among others) has been that what people should really be after is getting people to subscribe to their feeds, and Top Ten Sources is a great way of promoting a feed and thus getting subscribers (this overlaps with the idea that RSS is a form of advertising - it’s a means of me advertising what I do to the world, in the hope that getting people back to my site, or at least in the hope that I can develop a deeper relationship with them.

All well and good. But I have to say there’s a fair degree of fudge around in all this. John Palfrey, who’s involved in Top Ten Sources, has written a good and fair post about the raw legal copyright implications, and has rightly suggested some kind of Creative Commons implementation within RSS is going to be needed. But I think he skirts the central economic question - where’s the money going?

Is Top Ten Sources hoping to make money? And is it going to share this money with people providing content to it? Because if, for instance, they took this blog’s RSS feed and aggregated it, they’d be making money from this blog’s content, wouldn’t they? Now, it may be that I make a sane economic judgement and say well, the promotion on Top Ten Sources is worth something to me in the form of new eyeballs, so I’ll let it ride for now. But let’s not pretend that economic decision isn’t there.

Also, I don’t quite buy this argument about Top Ten “promoting” my feed. If Top Ten aggregates my full-text feed, why would someone subscribe to it? Doesn’t the logic of Top Ten imply that they’re going to want to scan the feed inside Top Ten, and not add it to their feed reader?

Also again: is Top Ten going to discriminate between “full-text” feeds and “excerpt” feeds? Because, let’s face it, this is really only going to work fairly in the long-term for bloggers if Top Ten aggregates excerpt feeds. Then it all makes perfect sense: promotion AND traffic for bloggers, and the possibility of aggregating community for Top Ten.

And one final question: how does this scale? If it’s all done by human beings, how do they stay on top of new blogs in a particular category? As we all know, old blogs die and new blogs are born every minute. The churn rate is incredible.

None of which is to say that Top Ten Sources isn’t a good idea, or has potential. But don’t even get me started on the fact they’ve built it using ASP pages….

Our Ricky Gervais podcasts have now been downloaded more than two million times. Amazing. Check out the MediaGuardian story here (registration required).

“Usually, in order to be heard by millions of people you have to do a show on Radio 1 or Radio 2,” said Gervais. “The problem is, those stations expect you to be competent and professional. We had to find a way around that.”

Gervais’s show is seven weeks into a 12-week run and knocked Radio 1 breakfast host Chris Moyles off the top of the UK download charts.

I don’t know enough about radio to say how this might compare with a mainstream or even a niche radio show. I seem to remember In Our Time was doing slightly less than 100,000 downloads an episode six months ago, but it’s probably more now.

Anyway, I’ll say it again: two million downloads.

Here’s some more food for thought: according to PaidContent.org, it takes 50 votes from 140,000 or so digg users to get a story onto the digg front page. This got me to thinking about a key difference between “participatory media” sites like digg.com and, as it were, “directed media” sites like Guardian Unlimited (or indeed any newspaper site). On digg, obviously, the community decides what goes on the front page. On GU, the editor does.

But let’s break those concepts down a little. The PaidContent stat seems to imply that, actually, the community doesn’t decide what goes on the front of digg. Actually, a very small, statistically almost insignificant number of individuals decide (some 0.035%) that a particular story goes on there. Of course, it’s not the same 0.035% for each story, and I’d be interested to know the percentage of diggers who regularly post stories. Because this number is quite so small, it’s hard to accurately say “the community says this story is important.” It’s a bit like saying “the record buying public thinks the current number one song is great” at a time when single sales are in freefall.

Another point about this: digg.com is obviously not the only “participatory media” site out there. Its 140,000 users also use other sites (Slashdot, for example), while there are millions of other users who don’t use digg at all. The number of people “participating” is spread across more and more sites. If the wisdom of crowds counts for something (and I believe it does, of course), then how big and active does the crowd have to be before it becomes wise?

On GU, the editor decides what goes on the front. But actually, it’s not one editor, it’s a team of editors, sharing stories, discussing them, making a case for them. These editors are making decisions in the way editors always have, based on their skill and judgement, and based on their understanding of the Guardian’s editorial priorities and what the Guardian stands for. But unlike traditional print editors, they are also in possession of two key additional feedback loops: they hear from users all the time via email, and they have real-time stats on what people are using. These two things inform their editorial choices. The relative weight the editor gives two their own judgement and external feedback is different from editor to editor, of course. But the feedback is there.

All of which is a long-winded introduction to the core question: are 50 digg users more “representative” of the 140,000 digg users? Or is a group of GU editors more representative of the GU community? In my more militant moments I’ve often wondered how GU would look if we handed over the front page to the 12 million unique monthly users - would it be more reflective of the community, or less? Isn’t it probable that, actually, all that would appear on the front page would be stories around issues on which people tend to hold “extreme” positions, so they are prepared to work harder to force those issues to the fore?

I don’t know the answer, but I do know my instinct. My instinct is that everything we do to “edit” the site seeks to keep a balance between editorial instinct and the desires of the audience, and that, in doing that, we may be reflecting the “community” more fairly, both mathematically and ethically, than the likes of digg.

In a fairly high-level interview with MediaGuardian.co.uk, Craig Newmark reveals a little of what’ll be coming our way in 2006:

Newmark has invested in a website edited by Jeff Jarvis, MediaGuardian columnist, who believes newspapers must now look to share their resources with citizen journalists. While Newmark is reticent about specifics, a rollout is anticipated this spring. He is also working on a “collaborative filtering technology, which is supposed to help people find the most trustworthy versions of big stories,” he says. “But it’s not a citizen journalism project in the sense that people are thinking. And while I’m very excited about citizen journalism, I do remind people consistently that there’s no substitute for professional journalism.”

Yet Newmark favours the idea of “community truth” derived from a global army of fact-checkers whose intentions are well-meaning, based on his experiece of dealing with the users of Craigslist. “I’m looking to organise the world’s news using the best of technology, community, and editors because I think we’re in a period of historic change,” he says. “With the internet everyone gets the chance at describing what history is.”

I may just have missed it, but I didn’t know Newmark was in bed with Jeff Jarvis. And as for “collaborative filtering technology”, I just don’t know. Whose version of “the truth” are we going to be talking about here?

Scott Karp over at Publishing 2.0 has a juicy rant against the Old Media doomsayers, arguing passionately that “most people are drowning in an ocean of infinite media (the blogosphere being the perfect storm)” and that Old Media (or mainstream media, or traditional media, or whatever) still has a place, because it packages this infinite cornucopia into parcels that real people (as opposed to unreal people like you and me who subscribe to thousands of RSS feeds and then complain that their heads hurt) are comfortable with:

Let’s say I’m the average person who wants to see what blogs are all about. I’m interested in health and wellness. Where do I go to find the best blogs on this topic? Technorati? Even in the very unlikely event I’ve heard of Technorati (the name is so off putting), a search of Health and Wellness produces a list of random blog posts, including many in Asian languages. (Did you know there is an entire blog about thrush?) I’m going to give up Prevention magazine for this?

It’s not the democratic web. It’s the anarchic web.

I take his point (and I’ve posted here before about not getting ahead of the curve in our enthusiam for the technological cornucopia which has opened up before us). And, like Scott, I’m beginning to find some of the more Messianic voices of “open media” a little tiresome.

But on the other hand, don’t put the cart before the horse. We’re in a phase where new content is being created at a furious rate, but the tools for indexing and packaging it for a mainstream audience simply aren’t there yet. I believe they will come, and mainstream media will be a big supplier of them.

Take podcasting. I find it acutely difficult to find really good podcast juice without wading through an awful, awful lot of garbage. Somebody needs to package this stuff up. Somebody needs to make a podcast brand which I can associate with and give some trust to, that I can rely on to find me the good stuff and let me get on with my life. Google isn’t doing it. iTunes could do it, but doesn’t seem to have the resource. And I don’t want to have to wait until all my friends are sufficiently into podcasting so that they can share their good stuff in some social media stylee. I want the Guardian (or the Times, or the Telegraph, or the Sun, choose your colour) to do it for me.

And someday, they will. In fact, media companies might change the way they look at themselves to put this “indexing” behaviour at the heart of what they do. Newspapers already organise the day’s events and replay them to me. Why shouldn’t they organise this cornucopia and replay it to me? Why shouldn’t the best “amateur” content creators accumulate around their media hub of choice? Assuming, of course, that you think they have to accumulate around anything. I do, and I suspect Scott does as well, otherwise this mighty new media universe looks like a jellied mess.

Of course, this looks like anathema to the super-independence offered by mass amateurisation. But how’s your granny going to find the podcasts she likes? By using a social recommendation engine like Loomia? I don’t think so. She’s going to want her equivalent of the Radio Times, and who can blame her?