It’s the End of the Web as We Know It … or, Speed Kills
Those of you who follow me on other social nets like Twitter or Facebook know that I am pretty opinionated when it comes to politics. Suffice to say that I am a card-carrying member of the “Liberal Coastal Elites.” (I try not to over-indulge or bore folks with it; and I certainly can play nice with my right-leaning friends.)
I bring it all up only as a segue to the fact that I am a big fan of Andrew Sullivan’s Dish blog. Sullivan’s one of the big dogs in blogging; he’s been freshly-empowered by his move to the Daily Beast to experiment with new technologies; thus I increasingly look to The Dish not just for political musings but as a pioneer exploring the future of the medium.
In recent weeks, for example, Sullivan hosted a live-chat with over 8,000 readers, to debate his ballyhooed NEWSWEEK cover story. He implemented an “Ask Andrew Anything” video series featuring his rotoscoped image waxing on issues large and small. He’s also live-blogged most of the GOP debates and caucuses — all with the help of only a handful of staffers. It’s a lean yet media-savvy organization that manages to post a mix of original and curated content upwards of 10x a day.
In a post last week, really almost a throwaway, Sullivan notified his readers that he and his team would be live-blogging the South Carolina contest:
“Yes, we’ll be live-blogging the results from South Carolina tonight starting at 7 pm. When I say ‘we’ I don’t mean it royally. We all scour the web and the in-tray for data, ideas, views, reactions, images, as they come in, and I organize it all into a single post and write it in real time.
“The kind of journalism that no one was ever expecting to do until a few years’ ago.”
That may overstate things: while few expected bloggers to become so sophisticated, what’s actually happening is that premier blogs are becoming more like broadcast outlets than websites. This is not so much a journalism issue as a speed+consistency issue. As Sullivan has noted:
“Matt Drudge told me when I sought advice from the master in 2001, (that) the key to understanding a blog is to realize that it’s a broadcast, not a publication. If it stops moving, it dies. If it stops paddling, it sinks.”
Two of the top blogs in the world? Drudge‘s and Sullivan’s. Speed kills.
It’s the end of the Web as we know it: the more online we are, the more we expect the web to mirror the real time tv networks. It’s the beginning of the end of the static web. We’ll cease to think of it as a text/narrative-based medium soon enough.
With this in mind, if you are a brand considering a more aggressive Content Marketing strategy in 2012 … Will you be able to keep pace?
Posted on: January 23, 2012 at 12:46 pm By Todd Defren
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It’s not beginning of the end of the static web but rather the time of static web is already behind the above
Perceived another way, the more activity you do on social media websites, the higher your virtual dividends increase on Empire Avenue. Tweet more, and your shareholders get more. Take a Twitter vacation and your shareholders get less.
I view websites as static. I view blogs as dynamics. SEO matters less for a website if content is static, because search robots will not index the content as often. Isn’t that what you’re essentially saying? To be dynamic?
Good post. Strongly agree with media analysis portion of it. For Sully, well… my (lengthier, more acerbic) thoughts are here (http://wp.me/p1ToMC-cu).
And that’s not even touching his ruminations on Trig Palin’s origin…
Good post, Todd. I definitely feel a sense of terror when I consider this, and also think curation and conversation are taking higher roles. Further, corporatization of content creation is bumping out independent voices.
That being said, I still think less is more. A great post, a great article will always be appreciated, and in many ways serves as the center point for conversations. We need depth sooner or later. It’s just how much of it?
Nothing has changed news is time dependent and that’s what these sites specialize in. As a brand, how does that relate? A brand sometimes has news or most of the time, it doesn’t, it has a message and a message like “Drink coke…” etc, isn’t news so how does the instant news cycle relate to brands?. Brand messages are not news. But they can advertise next to news…
I hear you, Tom, but I cannot help but wonder if the MOST SUCCESSFUL “brand journalism” efforts will be marked by a consistent clip of content creation. It won’t be news driven all the time – maybe not even most of the time – it could be in the form of curated content (a Dish staple, btw), behind-the-scenes videos, infographics, blog posts, etc. Just, A LOT of that shit, pretty much ALL the time.