Root/Exchange: Will Securitization/Transparency Lead to Democratization/Accessibility?

As services like Shopify (for physical goods) and Jyvepro (for spoken services) further democratize and decentralize the act of selling on the Internet, trends first precipitated by eBay and later amplified by Google Ads, it will be interesting to see whether Root/Exchange, by design or circumstance, becomes a marketplace that exclusively serves the large companies that currently dominate lead transactions, or if it develops over time to mirror the equities markets, which are for the most part equally exploited by large institutional investors and smaller players down to the individual level. In the beginning at least, I imagine it will be restricted to larger players, but if the Root Exchange is designed properly and provides a transparent marketplace, it will become a useful tool for all types of sellers and fully reflect the structure of Internet commerce.

Full disclosure: I do not work in lead generation or online advertising. Feel free to point out any errors of assumption or conclusion in the comments.

Gather – Editor Knows Best

In descending order, Gather highlights “editor’s picks”, “top rated articles” and “most read authors”. It’s interesting to see who comes first in the hierarchy.

Aggregation is a delicate mix of control and letting go. Somehow, with its Jackson Pollack array of sections topped off by a group of editor’s picks, Gather has managed to simultaneously err on the side of both extremes.

Lastly, I’m not sure why some bloggers have reacted so negatively to the use of categories. A number of sites effectively combine tags with pre-defined topics/categories (see squidoo and etsy). Certainly doesn’t seem like a mortal sin to me.

Newspaper Blogs – Houston Chronicle Stands Out

I was interested in seeing how major U.S. newspapers compare when it comes to highlighting their columnists’ blogs on their homepages. The Houston Chronicle is the only one that really seems to do a good job of it, with a top level menu tab labeled “Blogs“. Honorable mentions: the Washington Post highlights their online Discussions with a top level menu tab. The Denver Post highlights their Bloghouse (not really sure what it is, either), but it would be more helpful if they also directed you to a list of the blogs themselves. Still, they do give prominent links to their podcasts and multimedia content.
Media surveyed: NY Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Chicago Sun-Times, CNN, LA Times, Baltimore Sun, Denver Post, Atlanta Journal Constitution, and the Miami Herald.

Nik Cubrilovic on Web Startups

Omnidrive founder Nik Cubrilovic has written “Starting and Running a Web Business“, a great lens over on Squidoo. If you’re interested in starting a web-based start-up, this is a good starting point.

Marketing the Root.net Attention Trust Recorder

Why do some companies obsess on marketing to the early adopter Tech Crunch crowd instead of reaching out directly to the mass of Internet users? If you have some geek-specific tool like blog-writing extension Performancing , then perhaps the focus is warranted. But if you’re Root.net, and you have a tool like the Attention Trust Recorder that would monetize the clickstreams of millions of users, why waste all your time on tech insiders – just make a direct pitch.

Behind the sometimes abstruse theorizing on the Attention Trust Economy lies a subsidiary (if not central), simple idea that the non-geek public has proven they can grasp. Get paid for something you would do anyway. There were some ISP’s and computer makers back in the late 90’s that gave people low-cost computers and/or free Internet service in exchange for recording a user’s Internet activity. While these services weren’t ultimately successful and the Root Exchange is an altogether different beast than pay-to-surf – my point is that the public proved they could understand an analogous proposition.

A Quick Taxonomy of User-Generated Content

Services based on user-generated content can, I think, be grouped into three categories:

1) The selfish service, as described by Josh Porter. People generate content because it’s useful to them (i.e., del.icio.us, flickr, myspace). This is the predominant template.

2) The unselfish service – people generate content out of a pure sharing impulse. Wikipidea works on this principle. This structure only works if there is a truly massive user base. The ratio of contributors to read-only users of Wikipidea is, I would bet, well below one percent.

3) The nakedly selfish service – people generate content to promote their personal brand or to earn money (Squidoo). [I'm not entirely happy with this title - Squidoo, for example, has a large charitable comoponent, and many, if not most, people contribute out of an impulse to simply create something fun and share their knowledge. Still, the structure does provide content generators with a monetary incentive.]

In the end, all three can work, and all are vulnerable in different ways to splog(?) abuse [Note - I think we need a new term for user-generated content abuse - slug?].

(repost from a comment left on Pete Cashmore’s blog)