Because the ‘net never sleeps, a couple of interesting posts have popped up late today.
One is Lost Remote’s musings on Wikia, an open source plan to take on Google search. I’m not overly interested in the overall project, but Lost Remote raises the possibility this could redraw the local search lines.
Rather than share fifty percent of the online revenue pie with search engine-driven ad sellers and paying them to market yourself at the same time, Wikia may offer the golden opportunity to band together and start creating local search products in house that can offer a higher share of online revenue.
Local search is one of the great battleground for local newspapers. Google is already pouring significant resources/effort into local search, and the ad bucks that will potentially flow from it. Anything that gets newspapers into that fight — such as the possibility Wikia may offer — should be closely examined by the business office.
The second bit of news is bigger — Scott Karp’s announcement of Publish2, a start-up where he’s going to put into practice much of what he’s been writing about. From his new blog:
Standing on Digg’s shoulders, Publish2 solves the WHO problem by creating a platform for networking the one group of people who are disproportionately more likely to be effective news filters across every conceivable topic: JOURNALISTS.
~snip~
Publish2 will create the ultimate consumer news service by networking journalists’ news intelligence.
I’m not going try to encapsulate the proposal in a few words. Go read the full post for the details: there’s a lot there.
I’m sure that over the next couple of days we’re going to be reading a lot about this on the ‘net. It is a breathtaking proposal, at least on first read. It will be interesting to see what the response is and which holes are poked into it. I need to think about this a lot more before I can add my couple of cents worth.
It’s going to be a hell of thing to watch, though.
TAGS: JOURNALISM, AGGREGATION, SEARCH, NEWS
For all but a few people, Wikia search looks more like another experiment in the social serfdom that’s all the rage these days. You “share” some combination of your subject-matter expertise, coding skills and CPU cycles with Wikia with no promise of them “sharing” any of their money with you.
My reaction is identical to the one I give to “citizen journalism” operations who want me to “share” my skills and labour for no return: Blow me.
On the other hand, Karp’s proposal seems interesting and possibly even well-designed. What will be interesting to see is if it can scale down to regional issues.