New Media Model - It's a Network of Networks Emerging

The world is clearly moving to a “Network of Networks” we’ll all be interconnected in some way and it looks like the smartest technology companies are moving that way.

Feedburner is testing a new concept called Feedburner Network as outlined by Brad Feld, who sits on their board of directors. Brad writes “A FeedBurner Network is a collection of blogs that fit within a particular topic. The goal is to create high quality collections of similar types of publishers. For example, if you are interested in reading Venture Capital bloggers, you currently have to manually poke around to find them.” Fred Wilson another investor has a post talking about it as well.

Networks are a key focus for providing some user coherency to the flood of all the new user generated content. What’s interesting about this announcement is that Feedburners primary model is to host a blogs feed and now they are expanding to providing a filtered approach to content aggregration and user consumption. Oh they provide ads too in the feeds. Mike Arrington thinks that it is a hard or impossible task. What I find fascinating about this story is that it isn’t Feedburner that is doing this…it’s the board members Feld and Wilson. To me that is the big story here… Talk about board added value. Kudos to Brad and Fred.

Mike Arrington who started Techcrunch as a small blog has become the Techcrunch Network has an opinion on the topic. Mike says “The biggest issue around this will be what rules are used to determine which blogs are included in a given topic. It isn’t clear if there will be any real quality control - in his post Brad says each network will have a gatekeeper to make sure only blogs on topic are included, but there doesn’t appear to be any hurdle as to what constitutes a quality blog in a topic. That could work out badly. And if the bloggers and/or the network coordinator are making subjective decisions on which blogs can be included in a given network, this will end in tears. The politics around who’s in and who’s out of a blog network are impossible.”

Obviously PodTech is a big fan of what Feedburner is doing and the ideas that Brad and Fred put out. The PodTech Network has been developing over the past 8 months with very good success. The world is clearly moving to a “Network of Networks” we’ll all be interconnected in some way and it looks like the smartest technology companies are moving that way.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 6th, 2006 at 10:55 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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