Filling new niches

Just a few notes on yesterday's "The Future of Publishing" panel. It was about how the web -- ok, the Web -- is quickly being transformed by social media platforms and, in some cases, supplanted by alternative content delivery methods,organized by my ever efficient and appropriately named friend Amy Webb.

One of the presenters was Brian Gruber of Fora.tv, a site trying to create an "ecosystem" based on videos of presentations by world thought leaders captured by third parties. So Condi Rice gives a speech on something and it ends up on this site, along with other talks by other leaders in politics, thought, business, culture, etc. The early bisiness model is sponsorship, trying to create an elite environment for leading companies.
"There are brilliant people around the world presenting in public places and their audience is constrained by physical locations, so we create an environment or an ecosystem for global brands who want to be thought leaders, want to associate their brand as leaders in safe and trusted environment."

The other guy offering a new tpe of content was Erik Schwartz of foneshow, which is a new fledgling way of getting audo content on your cellphone. The idea behind that is that podcasts never took off as promised because plugging one's iPod or other MP3 player into a computer to download every broadcast is a geeky hassle. This service sends out podcasts to people's cell phones -- which, he noted, are now more numerous in the world than toasters -- so they can listen to them whenever and wherever they are.

The bottom line, as Amy put it, was the news sites don't have have to be building all these sorts of things from scratch, that there's plenty of new services popping up that we can partner with or at least utilize as we try to broaden our digital reports.