As noted in the Marketwatch story Morgan Stanley's Meeker sees money in blogs, Mary's done an excellent job of putting together a document that outlines a lot of what's going on with blogs, microcontent, My Yahoo, RSS, and so on.
In the unlikely event that she reads this, I have two things to say:
- Thanks for helping to shine a light on what we're doing and validating it as the future of this business. It's good to know we get ahead of the analyst community now and then. I think Yahoo in a good position and it seems that Mary does too. :-)
- Money aside, your report does a very good job of introducing this crazy new world to new audience. Given the combination of self-publishing, syndication, aggregation, social networks, advertising, and new media types (podcasting, anyone?) the learning curve has been getting steeper.
One result of her publishing this document will be to make life even more interesting for some of us--if ya know what I mean.
Posted by jzawodn at October 27, 2004 01:09 PM
hey, the team thanks you! fyi, you can find a copy of the report plus the china slides from battelle / o'reilly web 2.0 you mentioned a few weeks ago at www.morganstanley.com/techresearch.
Read the report...neat, but a little optimistic on RSS in its present form.
To fulfill the uber-optimistic Meeker scenario, RSS will need to expand. Give me RSS search by category. Give me a reputation system based on standards that helps me pull the gems out of the manure.
Also beware the coming blog implosion. The novelty of blogging will wear off for many. The novelty of being in the blogging business will also wear off for many of the blogger toolchain/hosters. Remember everyone was supposed to have a Geocities page at one point in 1997.
RSS and blogs have maturing to do, as well as evolving. The integration of search with blogs and RSS will be a key point in making news/features/entertainment truly interactive (as opposed to network news and cable channels all force fed at times and with content we may or may not want.
Imagine a TV set which could deliver surveyed entertainment or news on demand - or improve it's random selection based on some "stumble upon" algorithm and use-based database.
Blogs will be around for awhile, it will be people who move in and out of using them.
Downloaded her PDF and looked it over. Some errors in logic threw her off in the conclusion - at least we disagree on the outcome.
I offer an alternate solution in terms of tailored searched and pre-downloaded broadband according to user preferences as a true next-step evolution to making money off blogs and RSS. However, my model keeps the current evolution of blogs as the introductory service, not intermediate or higher.
The posting is at http://worstellr.blogspot.com
Robert
