It seems that as information nears the point of zero-price (not zero-cost), new types of tools and processes must emerge to take advantage of this seeming wealth of information. Even information that is free comes at a cost. "Making information free to individuals who cannot afford to pay for it—as well as developing software to support authors, editors, and reviewers—to fuel the democratization of information is not easy ..." Sandy Serva, EContent Magazine The services and products that will emerge to harvest what is quickly being commoditized, is (and will continue to be) a large market opportunity. The notion of a NewsMaster was recently coined by Robin Good. Other newsmastering roles (that demand special tools) are emerging each day. Imagine the challenges ahead for today's Webmasters who will soon find these tasks at their doorsteps: - Find the most relevant RSS items from a variety of information feeds that philosophically support our newest upcoming product release and splice them into one feed. Oh, and could you splice in an item that points to our press release? One last thing, make sure none of our 17 competitors' domains are referenced in that feed.
- Syndicate the most recent press releases (which occured in the last 30 days) from each of our 300 resellers into one page on our Web site.
- Combine the most favorable ideas about our new beverage from bloggers and mobloggers. Put it into a secure system where we can use it like a news resource. Oh, and make it easy for us to comment on each item but make sure the comments are in RSS form as well - we have time to read the comments, but we don't have time to actually browse this content.
- Review our 50 RSS feeds for any errors such as encoding issues, broken links, and spelling errors. Also, remove any references to any reseller who is not current on their accounts.
- Create a media crisis center to cover news about the 1300 people our company just hospitalized due to a toxin spill in Alaska. It should have a real-time Weblog, RSS feeds, and a streaming feed from our CEO which will be finished in three minutes. Oh, and could you get some high Google visbility on this by morning. One last thing - we need the site online in 55 minutes.
This is what NewsMasters are faced with, but there are products that support this process such as our own Blogsite system - a weblog application that integrates multiple content channels (i.e., weblogs, syndicated feeds, private forums, FAQs, etc.) to address specific newsmastering requirements. |
