POTB -- I watched a Zenark scraper buzz through dozens of screens filled with news listings before concluding there is little money to be made in charging people for a selection of onlne newsfeeds. Once someone creates a thematic list of quality newsfeeds, someone else will scrape it and repackage it. The Irishblogs feed at Technorati is already scraped by Intelliseek, read by mainstream journos and harvested by aggregators. In the venture capital realm, Feedburner drew down $7 million in second round funding. There's a message behind all this activity. It concerns the intersection of information and advertising.
If you have something on screen that commands reader attention, you have a product that appeals to publications who need a way to halt the erosion of readers from their portals. For every new Irishblog that appears, the mainstream Irish portals lose at least one reader.
As participants in the May 2005 IIA Conference will hear, Ireland is currently morphing from the page view model to the attention model. Google and Overture know this. They are telling their clients that the most effective advertising in their system masquerades as information. That's why you see so many AdSense advertisements popping up all over the internet. They work for clients. They pay the bloggers.
DISCLAIMER: I make money from both Google and Overture advertisements. Go ahead--click a boxed link on the right hand column like 21 other people will do today. Or search by using the Yahoo! context system. It's free to click.
Sites like POTB play out well in this newly-formed attention economy. In a matter of months, POTB will be a single stopping point for news you will hear in the mainstream press the next day. It's happening already. I'm interested in where it leads.
Steve Gillmor -- "Vote with your feed"
