I had one of those moments that you all have probably felt at one time in your life. You read or hear something that reminds you of something that happened to one of your parents and you feel a biological sense of déja vu.
Among other professions, my dad has a background in engineering (received a EE from U of Washington in the early ’70s). He and I, despite our personality differences, share many of the same kind of creative imaginations — continuously concocting some hair-brained scheme. Throughout the past 25 years he has tried, failed and succeeded in more endeavors than anyone I can think of in all the history I have sifted through. If a movie were to ever be made of his life, I could think of nothing other than “Meet the Parents” mixed into a business environment — coming so close that it hurts. And now I can see how he must feel time and again when that eureka becomes someone else’s (i.e. in the early ‘80s he visited Japan and thereafter contacted various American car manufactures, noting that there was a large market for minivans – all of which fell on deaf ears).
Well, my moment came today while reading a story at News.com on the Gawker blog phenomenon:
The simplicity of the model may be why Denton is alternately guarded and dismissive of all the hype surrounding blogs. He seems to recognize that he is not up to anything particularly trailblazing, and that it’s only a matter of time before others catch on. Competitors like Jason Calacanis’ Weblogs, with its network of more than 70 consumer and niche blogs, are already copying the Gawker model.The idea of grouping the blogs, Denton said, was to give the company an air of respectability. “The only reason we’re listed as a group at all is for advertisers,” he said. “Advertisers treat Gawker titles more seriously because it’s part of a group.”
Let me tell you a story about a company called Collectrix.
2.5 years ago I hatched an idea of selling various wares online, notably collectible cards (i.e. Magic: The Gathering). Collectrix seemed like one of those names that fit the bill and was available for procurement (check out DeletedDomains.com for a list of some graveyard names that can be purchased). A long story short, because of how the supply-chain works within that industry, card makers (such as Upper Deck) frown upon virtual stores and would therefore charge Collectrix retail prices (as opposed to wholesale). In fact, because of how I wanted to cut out the middleman, I seemed to make an enemy, with of all people: Steve Jackson (read up on how he got shafted by some spooks).
Anyways, so I had this domain but nothing to do with it.
Then some buddies of mine asked if they could have a subdomain and email address through movementarian.com. At around the same time I was becoming increasingly frustrated with the editorial policy at movementarian.com. For those unfamiliar with this site, in the summer of 2002 I started a satire-esque website after being spurred by various events in my own life and from some of the more nuttier things found in the zeitgeist (such as religious zealots and the upcoming Iraq War). So back-tracking a couple of months…
It was one thing to have this idea of creating a more libertarian version of The Onion and another to implement it. Thus around July of 2002, I turned to my trusty dirt-cheap technically-inclined Ukrainian immigrant guru, David Veksler. Another long story short, David is hard working guy that can pretty much handle any task, but he and I were ideologically worlds apart. The agreement for the ultimate editorial authority on the site culminated into one of those regrettable 50/50 decisions – since he would do the work for free, he was entitled to censor stories he felt that failed his litmus test (he is an Objectivist).
Anyways, after having several stories rejected and deleted from the main website I decided to turn to my own personal blog under the current subdomain. This decision was ultimately made during the first few months of 2003. For those doing the math, March was D-Day for the Iraq War. And this is what I had concocted.
I purchased about a dozen domains covering everything from the university world (AggieBlog.com, BevoBlog.com) to open-source software (GNUBlog.com). From these central sites I planned on setting up subdomain’s from interested parties and then link all their content together through RSS/XML feeds – pointing back to a main page. Thus, I would have effectively created community portals, complete with their own forum and central unifying theme (somewhat similar to what Geocities did back in the day but with more freedom for unlimited customization).
But I also wanted to make a concerted effort to put together blogs that could capitalize off of the information that would soon transcend from the soon-to-be war in Iraq, primarily from the perspective that it was avoidable and foolhardy. This ultimately never happened due to time constraints and a lack of technical coordination (though it did not help having a pro-war contractor building an anti-war community).
From a business model perspective, bandwidth and storage space were fixed costs which in the long run were relatively low. The software was free (i.e. Blogger, WordPress, MovableType) and publicity/traffic was easy to come by (I struck up a couple partnerships out-of-the-blue and Google liked blogs). All the sign-up, registration and blog set-up could be automated leaving the only variable costs for customer service. Therefore, profit margins were high and still are to this day [note: do not let anyone tell you that it costs oodles of money to maintain a website; in fact, patronize this guy – he took over the clients I dropped during a crazy fiasco a year later -- his rates are the kind you should compare everyone else to].
Anyways, the main idea was that Collectrix would set-up these communities based around a central theme, sell easy-to-use hosting packages for bloggers. Each of these bloggers would have links to one another (i.e. blogroll) which in turn increases their Google ranking (be sure to read up on PageRank). So in addition to receiving residual income through web hosting, advertising now comes into the equation.
At one point I was approached (emailed) by two different companies wanting to advertise across the entire network of sites for several thousand dollars per year. At the time of their propositions (September of 2003), I was gearing back up to return to graduate school and put this on the backburner. This idea ultimately fell apart when my upstream bandwidth provider dropped all of his clients for who knows what reason (to this day I have no idea what happened to him).
However other entrepreneurs have stepped in and done the same thing (i.e. Weblogs inc). And it has even evolved.
For instance, here is another idea spawned from putting together digital automation and the semantic web. If done properly, you can create countless websites with legitimate content by simply aggregating topical news, bypassing the need for any human editor overhead. For instance, if you wanted to make a blog discussing baseball cards you would search for all the RSS/XML feeds that were produced by sources on this topic. Then you would build a database that would filter and collate the news. Then you would assign some sort of hierarchy point system for a given authority (i.e. more authority/relevance points are given to the source if the information comes from a dealer). I suspect that this is the basic idea by which aggregators like News.Google operate with.
The only tricky part is filtering out the signals from the noise and if nothing else, which would be one of the tasks left to an editor (i.e. sift through headlines and repost snippets of the articles). When the visions of the semantic web come into existence (i.e. real AI agents) then even the lowly task of responding to emails could even be delegated to these digital assistants.
More to the point, earlier this year I actually emailed Glenn Reynolds over at Instapundit regarding this topic. I asked if he simply aggregated news dealing with set topics (i.e. Iraq War, papacy) and merely cut-and-paste a snippet of the article onto his site. While he never replied, the idea of creating a databank of pithy statements is another doable solution made possible by MySQL and PHP. Plus, through the use of AdSense, you as a website operator do not have to try and solicit advertisers business. Everything is done for you through generated code that can be cut-and-paste into the blog system. Quick, easy and painless.
And recently, an associate and I put together a website that did just that; though, due to legal liabilities I cannot divulge what it is called. But that is besides the point as this type of service is easy to setup so as long as you know how to operate a webserver. In fact, I would not be surprised if some aggregate-management system is created through the open-source community in the near future (all you would have to do is modify blogging and database software).
So here is to a brave new world of automated news junkie content provided to desk jockeys from sea to shining sea. Next time I will be sure to patent this method of allocating and distributing information — bunch of terrorist thieves!