Last night Yahoo had a mixer at Caesar’s club, Pure. Of course, Rich and I attended solely out of our journalistic sense of duty.
At any rate, we saw quite a few people and had some interesting discussions. Some of them actually had something to do with the Internet (believe it or not). For example, I ran into Dana Todd at one point. She’s a regular on the speaker curcuit and in my opinion, probably knows as much about this industry as anybody.
When our conversatioin steered towards blogs, and podcasts etc. she posed the following question:
“A year or two from now; blogs up or down ?”
I said down.
“Podcasts. Up or down?”
I said up.
“Video, or Vlogs. Up or down?”
Again I said up.
Nobody disagreed with me.
Once that was established I asked her about the implications of the scenario we just described. My point was, if companies like Yahoo and Google are focusing on ‘user generated’ content to the extent that has been suggested -insofar as using blogs as a determiner of ‘relevency’ and whatnot. Isn’t this a bad thing for the engines, marketers and everybody else putting their money on the blog horse?
Dana didn’t think so. “Hasn’t the entire history of Internet marketing been a spaghetti experiment? Throw it on the wall, see what sticks, and take it from there” She asked. Well, I couldn’t really argue with that. She went on to remark on “what a cheap experiment it is for the search engines” if the blog world implodes, really… what are the engines out? A little development time maybe?
I suppose that’s true enough also. I thought it was interesting thet no one in our immediate vicinity had any kind of reaction to the effect that ‘blogs are here to stay’ or ‘you guys are nuts’ or anything like that. To me, blogs reek of a trend to some extent. Podcasts and video blogs on the other hand, I think they have feet for a long run.
Think about it in terms of offline progression of media. Print was first, changed the world for hundreds of years. Then, along comes audio (radio) and after that video (TV) nothing kills print and there will probably always be a place for it but look at the ratio of people that get their news and information in today’s world from the radio or television compared to those who actually read a magazine or newspaper. On a protracted timeline, I could easily see internet media following a similar progression.
I gotta get an iPod.
Mike is a manager at Murdok. He has been with Murdok since 2000.
