Category — Quick thought

At last weeks Web 2.0 Summit, former American vice president Al Gore, made one very important point: The web needs to serve a purpose.

Think about it. Do we really know what the deeper, fundamental purpose is today? Are we using the web to make the world a better place, a more sustainable place? Could we? Could we focus more on things like that that are truly worthwhile instead of spending so much time on senseless Facebook apps?

My answer to all of the above is a resounding ‘Yes’. So let’s discover the real purpose of the web together.

Comments is a dreaded thing by many, especially at media companies. Because while it’s cool to have people participating and engaging, it’s a double-edged sword that calls for a lot of extra work and frustrations with trolls.

But the real question is whether people (and especially journalists) should just not find a way to put up with it and dive in in the hope of qualifying the discussion and drive even more participant engagement? I think so. [Read more →]

Following up on my post earlier today about whether there is any business opportunity in Web 2.0 services, I’m extremely pleased to see on ReadWriteWeb that Get Satisfaction - the popular customer service website - is intoducing premium services for a fee.

This is totally a step in the right direction, and it reinforces the point that good things should - and absolute can - cost money. It’s just a matter of the product or service being good enough. And Get Satisfaction certainly is.

My good friend Lars K. Jensen has a very interesting post on Medieblogger, where he tells the story about a friend, who got his account closed on Facebook and instead of being annoyed about not having access got annoyed that he was so annoyed about the lost access. Because it proved to him how important Facebook had really become in his life.

I think this is a great point. It’s all fine and dandy that we can discuss whether the Facebook phenomenon is over the hill, and some of us basically want to leave. But can we at the end of the day really do without it? For some the answer is undoubtedly ‘Yes’, but my guess is that for more people than we would expect it would be a silent ‘No’ uttered in disbelief.

Jeff Jarvis notes the beauty of thinking of journalists as modern day DJ’s, who tries to find a tune for the crowd to dance to. As he states the notion is much livelier than comparing journalists to stiff ol’ curators. So in a lot of ways it makes a lot of sense.

I think there is one more perspective it makes sense from. The way I see it, one of the major barriers for many journalists to actually embrace new media and the opportunities herein is what it does to their self-image. I mean, who really wants to be curators anyway? But being a DJ? Now that’s an entirely different matter.

Freeway Media, perhaps the star of the Danish new media night sky claiming to cover 40% of Danish web traffic (mainly due to youth community Arto.dk with lots and lots of page impressions), is having a public dispute with one of its associate companies, Newz.dk. They are only a short inch away from trying to strangle each other, and a company divorce looks like a real possibility

Without judging the merits of this particular case, I still find it quite amusing. Freeway is often by other Danish media companies put on a piedestal for their sheer brillance and gifted way of handling new media and business execution. It will be interesting to see how this dispute - which might as well take place outside a bar late at night or very early in the morning - changes this perception if at all.