natalalala in seattle

It is Day 1 of the WebMaster World Conference. I'm planning to blog intermittently throughout the conference on the sessions I attend -- so here goes with the first update.

John Batelle just gave the Keynote and introduced his new company, FM Publishing. John talked a bit about Search, Web.20 and the transformation of web publishing.

Introduction / Web2.0:
- we used to think that whomever won the browser wars would win the internet...not the case, MSFT is still playing catch-up on internet services
- what we have found is that people search: "what you are trying to get to is what is important"
- it is about "content and services" not the software that gets you there
- he believes that companies that win are the ones that leverage the architecture of participation - they let their customers build their business for them.
- The value that is provided is not the content per se, but rather the innovation in assembly / organization and accessibility of the aggregated content
- and of course, like jason fried, he talked about the importance of utilizing small teams to accomplish big things and the value of the long tail.

Search:
- Search is our navigation tool
- the cultural impact of search has just began (i totally agree with him here -- we're still in the early ages of discovery...that's what makes this all so interesting!)
-  Safa Rashtchy (lead investment analyst on search) thinks that the search advertising market will be ~$25B in 2010.

Publishing:
- Marketing in post search world: intent before content (are they looking for you?)
- Blogs are the ultimate definition of long tail
- A good blog has great editing/filtering, is deep linked and conversational. Currently they aren't monetized well -- but he expects the commercialization of blogs to come and that their current unmonetized state isn't  a required attribute of good blogging
- He gave a great slide indicating the readership of some top blogs / aggregation sites:
   o BoingBoing 1.7 million 
   o waxy.org - 700K
   o Searchblog = 90K
- The essence of great publications: conversations between Publisher-marketer-audience

He also talked a bit about Blog monetization and the opportunity for advertisers to connect with this massive publishing base -- and the complexity due to scale. He asked: How do you get your movie promo on 10,000 blogs targeting men 18-24,and make it easy to manage? Good question :) The key thing he notes is that bloggers want to be part of the conversation around which ads are shown on their site - they want to select the ads themselves. He also talked about how AdSense isn't really working for this market.

Federated Media (FM Publishing):
- authors own their own site and their own content
- music label for blogs
- very selective -- start w/ tech culture, then going to games etc.

I was surprised that John's new company doesn't leverage the long tail in a deep way-- it would seem to me that he would want top blogs as sort of premier distribution partners but then through affiliation he could leverage a large network of categorized blogs -- maybe letting people categorize their entry and if it relates add that content to his publishing / ad connection platform. hmmm.