Just got back from the Directional Media Strategies 2010 conference hosted by Kelsey Group. Their central theme was that Directional Media Publishers (I’ll defer to their definition but certainly encompasses traditional Yellow Page companies) need to move from a “Business Listing” centric view to a “Web Site” centric view for their ventures. To me, this just seems so “2010″. Which by that I mean, is this forward or backward thinking? Or maybe both? The real message here is that “DMPs”, in Kelsey parlance, need to take a strategy that supports a range of efforts to provide enhanced value on behalf of their customers. Fair enough as there does seem to be a valid value proposition for providing scaled support for things like SEO, SEM, Video production, Call tracking, and all kinds of other services.
My issue comes around the Web Site as being at the center of this proposition. Maybe my problem is that I’m too much of technologist and too prone to take things literally but I think we need a little “back to the future” here. The Business Listing is no longer sufficient in today’s world as being the “center” but I think we may have jumped ahead to thinking the Web Site should be the new center. I guess my training has taught to separate content from presentation and when I hear Web Site I see perfectly good structured content being swirled up with all kinds of good structured layout and as a result losing all of it. Of course, Google comes along and pulls everything back out and makes it searchable but aren’t we losing a lot in the process? It’s kind of like taking a bunch of ingredients, making a cake, and then boiling that cake in a distillation tower to get the ingredients back out.
To me, it seems like DMPs need to really focus on their content services apart from their web sites to anticipate a world where applications are many, distributed and not all theirs. While the rage is all about Facebook and Twitter I guarantee you they are not the last calls at the end of history. Other things are going to come along very soon (like Scvngr for gaming?). On the other hand, I don’t think these content services need to be the Semantic Web either. They don’t need to start out by being anything but well-documented web services designed to serve multiple applications. Sure, there are a lot of things like microformats and open data protocols but these are more frosting than batter. To break with the cake analogy it’s about ecosystems, not architectures. You have to start thinking organically, not structurally.
But, you know, I have a vested interest in this because this is the kind of thing we do. Maybe you can just throw up whatever you like and Google will suck it all up and not lose any information. Of course, like a black hole, you might not be able to get out what you put into it - Google has other universes to create. Do you care? Does it matter?
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come to life, although instead of seductive avatar asking about some new unmentionables, we get a a-buzzing and a-you-got-mail, er coupon message chirping on your phone. To me, this raises the question not of “Net Neutrality” but of “Net Ubiquity” and whether I as a consumer (or a business) will need to be locked into a proprietary technology/platform to access these deals. Sure, Shopkick should do all it can to try to establish this kind of a monopoly but monopolies aren’t in the general interest. Just as those zany Velociraptors found a way on Jurassic Park, so to will these deals find a way that won’t be corralled to one private network.
That certainly clears things up. :) Seems like more of a case of “we can, so let’s” instead of something that’s got a driving use case behind it.