Doc gives a bit of advice to newspapers. Some great ones, a few of which I’ve mentioned here before. My favorite:

Fourth, start following, and linking to, local bloggers and even competing papers (such as the local arts weeklies). You’re not the only game in town anymore, and haven’t been for some time. Instead you’re the biggest fish in your pond’s ecosystem. Learn to get along and support each other, and everybody will benefit.

The shark doesn’t eat the remora. Likewise, the big media companies shouldn’t compete with the bloggers, but recognize their importance.

Also of note, Doc mentions the controversy happening out in LA with ther LATimes publisher. And now he’s out  .

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Frank Gruber points to Fred Wilson, who says that MySpace is the “AOL of Blogging.”

Frank, who recently joined AOL in the Product Development area for blogging and RSS, agrees a bit, but I think he neglects to point out the most important point that Fred brings up.

It’s something I’ve been saying about MySpace for a while and it’s very relevant to Tribune (where Frank and I met) and other newspaper and media sites trying to embrace social networking.

The point is, that if MySpace tries to create a walled-garden like AOL did, at some point their users will awaken and the MySpace service will either begin a slow decline, or they will recognize it and open up, like AOL did recently.

And so far, it’s looking like AOL did the right thing.

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Kent is still looking for conversation. It’s funny because I’ve commented and linked to him numerous times, here and at Everybuddy and have never gotten any feedback.

I must be boring, too.

Well, one thing is for sure, he can’t claim I’m in it for the money. ; )

Yeah right. I predict this blog will make me rich. Check back in a year or so.

In fact, I predict anyone who has tagged a post ‘OPML’ in the last two weeks will be rich very soon.
Check back in a year or so.

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I’m a strong believer in the disintermediation of classified ads, which is partially why I chose the name of this blog.

In fact, I heralded Edgeio as a sign of what was to come, especially to the CareerBuilder people I work with.

So, like James Corbett, I was confused by Mike Arrington’s wording of “decentralised job board for tech” , as you can see by my comment on the CrunchNotes post.

Here is the way decentralization for job sites must work.

1. Companies make RSS feeds of their sites available.

2. A decentralized but comprehensive OPML directory of jobs is wrought.

3. The directory is available under an open license.

That’s really all there is to it. And there will still be plenty of ways for service providers to make money.

Now if I were Mike Arrington, I’d continue the lucrative site he’s got. I think that’s great.

In fact, there is nothing wrong with adding those feeds to the Open Job Directory as well. (OPML heads can go to the directory , but it’s all OPML 2.0 inclusion, so you better Grazr it.)
Since the majority of jobs in the Open Job Directory are from paid listing sites, it looks like just another aggregator. But that’s not true. It includes feeds from O’Reilly, Edelman and even Edgeio (OPML) .

And once a critical mass of Businesses are publishing their job feeds, it’ll make those paid-listing sites irrelevant.

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Einstein asked in 1954, “Can we visualize a 3D universe which is finite yet unbounded?”

Steve Gillmor answers a resounding yes, unleashing a Big Bang that may mark the moment in history when the uncleansed masses bought their liberation from the “man who sold the world”, Nick Carr.
Did he pull a rabbit from his hat? Or has the rabbit died, signifying the conception of a new web.

One where gestures rule over links, where metadata outshines data.

Nothing left here boys, but an empty silk hat.

“Now Frosty, being made of snow, was the fastest bellywhopper in the world.”

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Newsome counters a Jarvis post on Social Networks by saying he is singing to the choir :

As as far as niches go- the entire blogosphere is a niche. The tech blogosphere, where most of us hang out, would be a sub niche. A niche inside a sub-niche is not a niche. It’s a clique. That’s a quotable excerpt that will almost certainly not make its way up the mountain.

I don’t normally subscribe to the A-List argument, but it is true that, as in life, there are cliques in Social Networks.

Some are more enviable than others and some are more open to outside input than others.

But Kent has been linked to nearly a thousand times and I see Doc Searls and Dave Winer in that group.

Between both of my blogs, I’ve been linked to about one-tenth of that amount and linkers have included Jarvis, Searls and Winer.

I think they are doing an excellent job.

So is small the new big?

Yes, but look at it this way. I think it compliments Jarvis’s Law of Open Networks.
The Law of Network Fluidity: The number of working affinity groups within a social network should increase proportionately with its number of nodes. All nodes must be able to freely pass into and out of existing and new affinity groups.

If not, then you may have an A-list syndrome.One last point of clarity. I do not mean that a network cannot have a private or exclusive group. Just that there is no unintentional blockage that might signify a network design flaw or central control.

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In the old days, when people still listened to albums, you almost always found yourself liking some of the less popular songs better.

The biggest Allman Bros. fans like the eighteen minute, live “Whipping Post” better than “Ramblin’ Man”, which is available at every diner juke-box in the country.
So when it came time to turn a friend on to that band, you tried to impress them with the  more sophisticated stuff. “Listen to this guitar part. . .”

You might have been more successful introducing them to the “hooks” first.

It seems to me that a lot of Bloggers and Geeks are delving into the “deep cuts.” The world needs to be intoduced to the “hit.”

That’s not necessarily a Technorati 100 blog, by the way. It’s not reach that creates a hit anymore, it’s relationship. The new “hits” are perfect for “me,” not necessarily the whole world.
Search was a hit, because it was immediately understandable and useful to everyone.

A blog about gardening with 100 readers but tailored to my geography, could be a “hit.”

To introduce someone to RSS, you need to help them find their “hit” , not your Swan Song .

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Around six or seven years ago the subject of free site vs. subscriber-based was a big one. Big surprise that I have never waivered from free.

But I just realized how ahead of the game I was back then when I said to one editor, “we may want to charge different rates, because some of the site-users will be causing a drain on us, but others will be contributing. ya know what I mean?”

“No,” she said, which was understandable since we didn’t have forums of any kind at the time.

On a side note, at that time I was pushing for the company to adopt the Arsdigita Community System (see OpenACS ), and I admit that my notion of “paying contributors” was heavily influenced by Philip Greenspun.

Scott Karp seems to be thinking that the time has come to pay the users.

What a great way to promote Citizen Journalism (or whatever you want to call hyper-local-non-journalist-majors-traditional-media-aggregated-content)

For less than one yearly salary (I hope!) a news company could pay for ten local blog posts a day at ten bucks a piece.

10 X 10 X 365 = $36,500

Fifteen bucks if a photo, audio or video is included, of course. ; )
But really, we should just let the bloggers keep all the Google ad money, even though we might be driving traffic, and figure we’ll make it up at a higher level of long term relationship marketing.

In other words, they get the nickle and dimes and we get the gesture and attention data for the big payoff.

Sounds perfectly fair to me.

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I was just listening to a BloggerCon session on How to Make Money with Blogs hosted by Doc Searls.

ADDED: I forgot to mention the podcast is available at itconversations.com

Some felt advertising on blogs or in feeds was a viable solution while others like Dave Winer thought that was nickel and dime and missing the bigger opportunity.

I’m against ads in feeds for one reason, at least. The internet shuts off what it doesn’t want, and eventually gets what it wants.

If we haven’t yet learned this from the Music Recording Industry, Tivo etc., then I don’t think we are as far along as I thought.

Put another way, any unwanted or missing feature is an opportunity for another solution that will deliver a service without the unwanted feature or with the wanted feature.

The customer always wins on the web, because there is no scarcity.
So, the paradox works this way:
1. Ads in feeds will only work if users want them.

2. If users want them, they aren’t really ads, but content.

Most businesses use the phone. Most do not make money off phone traffic, ads, or even use it as a way to process an order. They use it to communicate in all kinds of ways.

Blogs will be used to communicate in all kinds of ways. Very few will have a business model tied directly to eyeballs or direct sales.

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