The Personal Bee is yet another news website, getting ready for launch of its aunch of its do-it-yourself news service. According to the company it self it is:
“a social media company that believe that the combination of RSS, smart analytics, and user collaboration will lead to a better way for you to find news on the topics you care most about”.
Hm, what does that really mean? It means that, users create and organize portals around topics like Headline News, Web 2.0 or Travel, Technolgy and Wine, for instance. Readers can then themselves subscribe to various existing “bees”, and can also create their own feeds around specific topics, keeping their portal private or letting others subscribe ( I guess that it is here that the company becomes a “social media company “). All the information is aggregated by the company’s software from various sites and blogs, but relies on portal owners, or “beekeepers,” to act as editors – vetting information as they go.
In general this is not really something new and the online news space is already getting very crowded. However, letting other portal owners act as editors is a very intersting idea. It reminds me of a discussion I had some time ago with the former editor of the San Francisco Chronicle John Oppedahl. He also believed that the news media as we know it is about to change, but the overflow of information is just too big handle. John meant that the need for news editors will be grow even stronger, and that we more than ever will need somebody to skim it all out for us, or make sense of it all.
I personally believe that the days of the big portals our counted and the direction we are moving towards are very rich personal, edited portals (not a la My Yahoo etc though) where we can share parts of the content or all of it with others.
Anyway, Personal Bee is plans to generate revenue through advertising, and is backed by Mohr Davidow Ventures . As a side note I can just say, that the future for online advertising looks very bright…(if anyone every doubted that).
New York Times has a good write up about how user generated content and how it is changing the media landscape. The article’s conclusion, is that most amateurs are just happy for having their clips posted on sites for everybody to see. However, more and more media companies are offering prices or even paying for user generated content. Even Yahoo is said to have signalized that it is moving away from creating its on content in favor of user generated material – and are willing to pay for it.
So what is so compelling about user-created material?
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It is cheap
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It taps into the social aspect of interactive media
But while user-generated materials can attract a lot of attention and drive a lot of traffic to sites like Myspace , the article points out that so far it has not been regarded as a winning format for major advertisers. Myspace is adding up to a million registered users a week, but has attracted little advertising reveune relative to its audience.
In response to this, Viacom’s chief executive, Tom Freston, is qouted saying, “It’s like inserting the advertising into a conversation between two people, and there are still a lot of questions about advertisers supporting user-created content.”
Still, I believe that there really is a good window of opportunity for user-generated content sites and networks over the coming two years, because at the end of the day, its one of the things that makes people tick’. We are all looking for a stage, for a little fame even if it is not on a American Idol format level, but rather amongs our own little circle of friends and peers.
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