Umair Haque / Bubblegeneration

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Content vs Distribution vs Edge Competences

Jeff has a cool post arguing that the content vs distribution false dichotomy is about to be exploded, and that conversations are about to capture/create most value in Media 2.0.

I think this is spot on, and I would contextualize the argument a bit - conversations are another example of what I call an edge competence. Value shifts to the edges of atomized value chains (like Media 2.0) - and at one end of the chain, we have reconstruction/smart aggregation.

Now, we can think about conversation this way: it only really becomes possible when attention is allocated relatively efficiently. You won't have a conversation with just anyone about anything (well, maybe at the pub) - on average, you know what you want to talk about. So conversation is an edge competence that's built on strategies which efficiently allocate attention.

Think about it this way: content becomes cheap in a world of citizen journalists; and makes reconstructing and exposing the right content valuable. How do you know you're achieving this goal? Well, you can easily check to see if you're building an edge competence in conversations, which should be flowing if you're getting the basics right.

-- umair // 4:10 PM // 0 comments

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