Talk on new economics of media

Umair Haque has an interesting talk on the "New Economics of Media" (PPT).

To summarize, the talk argues that lower barriers on media publication increase the abundance of media and the importance of attention. We need tools that surface what is relevant and interesting, that help people find what they need.

I particularly liked slide 54 on smart aggregators:

The Aggregator 2.0

Allows consumers to navigate complex media landscapes by efficiently allocating scarce attention according to preferences and expectations

Leverage deep information about content to predict utility derived by consumers, slashing search and transaction costs of consumption

Examples:

Collaborative filters
Recommendation & rating systems
Similarity & difference filters
Etc.

Smart aggregation is aggregation of content plus aggregation of information, expectations, and preferences about content

And slide 57 on reconstructors:

The Reconstructor is the aggregator 3.0

Deconstruct micromedia by altering, remixing, and filtering microchunks to reconstruct 'casts of personal media ... [For example,] blog entries from individual blogs, tracks from individual playlists

See also Scott Karp's summary of the talk.

See also my previous posts, "The RSS explosion" and "RSS sucks and information overload".