netzooid

It was only recently that I really started to think about media and the semantic web. Altavista, Google, Yahoo and others have been doing media search for a long long time. HTML and images can be found and thats about it. Yet, we long for a bit more. Podcasting has enabled many people to start distributing content in a meaninful way. Instead of being tied to computers we listen on demand on our iPods.

Now, technology piece #2 – BlogTorrent. Through the use of bittorrent bandwidth concerns are seriously addressed. While there may not be a huge benefit there is just one person downloading from your site, once 100s of people start coming things will be a different story.

Yet customers need to get to this content. GoFish has opened my eyes to what a media search engine could look like and how online sales could be distributed. You can search for movies, ring tones, or music and they will connect you to various providers.

Will this catch on though? Their approach falls short though in several areas. How do customers become aware of the content? A search engine seems for content to be a losing proposition if you are a content maker since if no one knows about you they can’t search for you. This brings us back to RSS and bloggers. People will find media through the blogosphere network. If GoFish could integrate reviews from blogs, a recommendation engine, and a referral system there would be a much greater incentive for everyone to use GoFish Time Oren is spot on when he says:

They are the two faces of the long tail phenomenon: Low entry barriers enable the creation of diverse content by diverse people, precision in access lets readers find matches to their tastes without unendurable overhead.

The other question is how do the content makers make money? There are some people who are debating how to make money from blogs. However, media is a different ballgame altogether.

There is the often-discussed but never quite working micro-payment system. Is this profitable? Say I produce a short film for $20,000. At $0.50 I need 40,000 people to watch to recover my costs. Besides the complete lack of recognized infrastructure, the micropayment system falls short. It totally misses markets such as DVD sales or promomtional items. I suppose these could also be bought through the blog somehow?. Or maybe there is someone out there who can aggregate these concerns in such a way that makes it painless for people to create content?

Out with the old and in with the new. Welcome to net zooid. For those of you who wonder what in the world zooid means…

One of the distinct individuals forming a colonial animal such as a bryozoan or hydrozoan.

Thinking about this is the context of the net, it makes a lot of sense. This is just one site in part of a much larger animal – the net. It almost makes you feel warm and fuzzy.