Val Landi's Weblog, Monday May 1
The Web 2.0 revolution that has so dramatically led the shift in media and advertising to online and interactive social-media platforms mirrors the dramatic change in lifestyle habits of a growing segment of wired, highly educated, and affluent Americans. The underpinnings of that shift include a subtle, but steadily growing consciousness about the fragility of our resources and the benefits of pursuing a more “natural” lifestyle.
The engines driving that lifestyle are women, who now have greater purchasing power than ever before and yet remain the bedrock of home and family. And it is women who reach out to the Internet to find community and solutions.
During the week of May 15th, Realtimepublishers will launch WiredBerries, the next generation of what Web journalists and pundits refers to as "Social Media."
WiredBerries is an online international community whose lifestyle is driving one of the fastest growing segments of the American (and soon global) economy: the natural lifestyle market.
The Wired Berries network is a place where women can go to find and share ever-changing daily content and the best information about products, services, food, travel, exercise, and new ways of doing things.
Wired Berries graphic and editorial environment—our “Your Space” user-generated social media, WiredBerries Radio, Editor’s Blog, and world-class feature content—will set a new standard for social networks and interactivity. Your Space is the place where members can interact, find connections for activities and networking, post photos, blog, share music, advertise goods and services, find events, send email and cards, and, down the road a bit, upload videos.
As the members of the Facebook, Friendster, and My Space generation come of age in the next few years, they will be looking for online communities that cater to a different set of needs and interests from their teenage and young-adult years. WiredBerries is for the women who have become accustomed to using the internet to interface, and who will be looking for a similar but more mature kind of community.
We are all spending more time at our keyboards than with our remote controls, and advertisers are rapidly following us onto the Net. Many of us can't remember the last time we watched a morning TV news program or even bought a morning paper. Prime-time network audiences are down 35 percent in the past ten years.
Our sense is that the growth of social networks as media platforms will follow what has been an almost Darwinian Law of media: the evolution from broad to specific, from mass to personal, from centralized content creation to distributed user-generated media, from paid to free content.
The Wired Berries founding team is confident that we'll lead the rise of special interest social networks as a powerful, new, media format (much in the same way that Bill Ziff ushered in special interest magazines back in the '60's with titles on yachting, backpacking, fly fishing and more recently, the niched programming of cable television). The specific will drive out the general. As Google has shown so brilliantly, it's a granular world.
WiredBerries will create an online community where women can go to find ever-changing daily content that fits into what some have dubbed a “metrospiritual lifestyle” –all of which wraps around and seeds the core of network-generated “Your Space” content.
Tags: Web 2.0 Social Media My Space Online Advertising User-Generated Media
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