Burdseed

The media business is changing — and fast.

As Seth Godin notes, just about anybody can produce almost anything digital these days and the lines between free and mass content are blurring dramatically. The traditional definitions of content (packaged assets like article, song, or show) have blurred with the rise of social media and the remix/mashup economy.

At the same time, the massive increase in connected distribution means that producers can reach consumers with bespoke or limited content ways never seen before.

The likely winners in all of this: those producers or aggregators that can capture consumer attention and move beyond the selling of mass digital assets to providing either limited goods or marketing ongoing entertainment experiences.

Om Malik provides a nice perspective on a decade of blogging.

I’ve been tied up with a bunch of family activity and work-related stuff, but his post inspired me to recommit to posting at burdseed again.

“We are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy,” wrote Marc Andreessen in the Wall Street Journal.

He’s absolutely correct and I agree that over the next decade we will continue to see tectonic shifts in the way that companies produce, and people consume, goods and services. Much of this will be due to software, but enabling the software is the massive proliferation of semiconductors and connectivity. It really is becoming an always on, always connected world and software benefits from this. Well worth reading.

I stumbled across this site with images of post-Katrina, abandoned Six Flags New Orleans.

Photo by Keoni Cabral

It’s strangely haunting and beautiful at the same time.

Today’s post of the day is actually a series of posts from earlier in the week about the design of news sites.

Photo by Robert Scoble

Andy Rutledge, a designer, published an analysis of the layout of New York Times web site, along with some hypothetical changes, and used it as an example of the design challenges faced by today’s news sites. This sparked a bunch of conversation on Twitter, including from current and former designers at the times. Om summarizes the discussion nicely.

Although Rutledge missed a bit with his comments about the Times and with some of the elements of his redesign, the essence of his message is correct: many news sites desperately need to be redesigned for the modern web. This problem is not limited to news, but extends to many first-generation web portals and sites in areas such as sports, entertainment, and finance. It’s also true for many of the early web 2.0 sites. Use of the web is changing and is increasingly being driven by social, devices, video, and living room or mobile use cases. Less is more in most cases.

There’s a lot of bad connected device analysis out there.

As more folks jump on Twitter and Google+ and on the microblogging platforms and get interested in emerging areas like social TV and second screen applications, I’m seeing a lot more longer-form content get published and posted on the social networks.

Unfortunately, a lot of this content isn’t very good and, in some cases, it’s flat out wrong or misleading. Since I read much it anyways as part of my daily routine, and a number of my twitter followers have told me that they appreciate curation in these areas, I’m going to attempt to highlight the better articles and posts. I’ll do this a couple of times a week, if not daily.

Most of these posts will be culled from the sources collected on the right sidebar. If you notice anyone missing who you think I should be following, please ping me.