Archimedes & Web 2.0 Marketing Levers

In my last Realtime blog, I talked about the evolution of media from standalone products to interactive platforms.

My major function at Realtime is to design and integrate Web 2.0 marketing tools into a publishing platform that allows IT companies to engage in meaningful conversations with their customers and prospects where they live and work: online in expert-led conversations, blogs, and podcasts—all based on the first law of  Web 2.0 publishing:

Using interactive two-way platforms to create great user-generated content. 

I was doing some heavy digging on the Web over the weekend, searching for new points of view and tools that our industry needs to engage in conversations with their customers and came across Michael Arrington and Keith Teare’s Archimedes Ventures.

Arrington is also the publisher of TechCrunch, a leading news-source for Web 2.0 ventures. Teare is a true visionary thinker and  the founder and former CEO of Realnames. Together, they are doing some of the best "future of media thinking" and investing on the planet.

Archimedes views the evolution of the Internet morphing from a publishing platform into a transport for a diverse set of human interactions.

They see, mirroring our view at Realtime, the Web 2.0 world dominated by two major trends:

Firstly the trend towards the two-way web, where new content is published in large quantities and in real time by millions of people at the edge of the network (the edge defined as the user, customer, and prospect universe).

Secondly the trend for the separation of content from its old forms. Text is no longer necessarily embedded in a web page, it can be syndicated through RSS or ATOM. Audio is no longer tied to the radio network. It can be Podcast or streamed or downloaded. TV shows are no longer necessarily tied to TV Networks. They can be delivered on demand across IP networks.

These trends will change the business models of several platforms. For example (I’ve quoted verbatim):

Publishing 2.0

Weblogs are simply the first incarnation of self-publishing. They have all the limitations of most first versions. Archimedes will be working with others to help develop subsequent, and more flexible and powerful tools for self-publishing in all mediums - text, audio and video.

Search 2.0

Searching old content by crawling and indexing it was the right solution for the early Internet. AltaVista first, and then others, did a great job of this. Google perfected it and applied a relevance and ranking algorithm that made it stand out from the crowd. However, as the velocity of change of data has increased, and the proportion of new data in the whole has grown, indexing and crawling appear dated. Relevance measured by links seems irrelevant for data only just published. Other measures of relevance need to emerge. Search will change more in the next 10 years than it did in the first 10 years of the Internet.