On SocialNets & The Power of The URL

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Robert Young, a frequent guest columnist on OM Malik’s Blog, has written a very accurate description about the changing media landscape and the power balance between consumers and corporations. The post is called: Social Nets and the power of the URL.

According to Young, one of the most [...]

Robert Young, a frequent guest columnist on OM Malik’s Blog, has written a very accurate description about the changing media landscape and the power balance between consumers and corporations. The post is called: Social Nets and the power of the URL.

According to Young, one of the most effective ways to measure the shifting balance of power between consumers and corporations it to look at the web as a huge collection of URL’s (I would call it the WebDNA), and then distinguish those URL’s that are controlled by corporations vs consumers.

Simply put, each and every URL should be viewed as a container for content that, in turn, can be distributed and redistributed. And the control of such distribution is increasingly in the hands of consumers, not corporations.

I like that precise definition, it really is what it all boils down to. That is why I prefer to call the URL’s for the WebDNA. Towards the end of the post he envisions the future of people powered community based-distribution networks:

Looking out several years, it’s not too difficult to envision a media landscape where the majority of traditional media distribution outlets reliant on the benefits of natural monopoly economics have largely been replaced with a highly-fragmented layer of people-powered community-based distribution networks.

I really believe that this is what we are going to see, in a way one could refer to “people-powered community-based distribution networks” as a true democratic economy, really even going beyond democracy in the sense that it is both empowering and rewarding the individual.

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Meeting With Naval Ravikant

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Yesterday I had the honor to sit in on a meeting arranged by CRV, with Naval Ravikant, founder of Epinions, and a number of other start-ups, as well as a former VC -guy with a dozen investment, and currently back in the start-up business again as founder and [...]

Yesterday I had the honor to sit in on a meeting arranged by CRV, with Naval Ravikant, founder of Epinions, and a number of other start-ups, as well as a former VC -guy with a dozen investment, and currently back in the start-up business again as founder and CEO for Vast. Naval was invited by CRV do give a Web 2.0 overview – and I must say that it was the best presentation and overview I have ever heard about the topic. Straight to the point, what works, why it works, when to invest, and what’s next (which of course nobody has any clue of…).

Naval’s current company Vast, also had its launch yesterday and looks very promising indeed. Vast is a search service that extracts classified ads from across the web, structures them, and then makes them available via an open REST API for commercial and non-commercial uses.

In more detail Naval says that Vast:

  • Is crawling the web and large parts of the blogosphere with a general crawler, similar to the ones operated by Yahoo!, Google, Ask, MSN, and Gigablast.
  • The crawler activates forms, and digs deep to find even dynamic data
  • It automatically recognize classifieds listings – currently cars for sale, job postings, and personals profiles, and extract and normalize the surrounding metadata (make, model, price, mileage, salary, location, title, age, gender, etc.).

Currently, Vast have, according to Naval, some of the largest databases anywhere, of over 15 Million classified listings across these three categories, automatically extracted and structured with no human oversight, from nearly 50,000 web sites and blogs.

That is pretty amazing…Ebay watch out? BTW, anyone can steal the site…

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