Those who know me know that I am big believer in thesis-based entrepreneurialism/investing. Specifically, I try to envision the environment variables that are coalescing to enable a big market space to emerge, the stategic areas of focus where investments (or entrepreneurial endeavors) are likely to bear fruits and the tactical pieces that must be executed on to secure the opportunity.
In my newest post for O'Reilly Digital Media, I take a look at the power of social computing, how it is converging with digital media and the role of Flash in the equation. Hence, the silly flasher graphic above. An excerpt from the article follows:
People are right when they talk about social networking as an “architecture of participation.” To put some scaling perspective on this architecture, 40M people today blog in some form or another. And for every “exhibitionist” that is inspired to self-express, there are 10X the number of voyeurs that come to watch, making this a game that is as much about reach as it is about the richness of the underlying content.
What this means is that for all of its goodness, the website-centric “post and host” model is giving rise to an “embed and spread” de-centralized, distributed one.
A simple example of this trend at work is that at vSocial, a garage band called Broadzilla can upload their music video to the vSocial web site, work the social networks by making friends, creating posts, commenting, participating in discussion groups, do the same on the music vertical sites, the blogosphere and generate almost a million plays of their music video all without spending a dime - or very few of them.
Multiply this by thousands of bands and you get a sense of how fundamentally this is beginning to disrupt the way music is marketed and empowering local bands in the process.
The full post can be accessed by clicking HERE.
