File this one under: Things that make you go hmm…
This past Sunday I wrote about my third book (which I am working on in my spare time, ie. not working on Mojo Supreme), Context is King. The book is essentially a combination of the macro-level trends around us now as well as the rationale behind the business model at our company here: context is king, vertical is the way to go.
I stressed that I was in no rush to publish it because it wasn’t like I was the first one pointing out the rise of importance of context, since contextual advertising has been driving revenue at Google, Yahoo!, etc. for some time. I mentioned that many have already been positioning itself for the boom in vertical markets. Looksmart totally repositioned itself along verticals. More and more companies are acquiring niche sites, CNET is one prime example, with its acquisitions of Chow.com.
Later on Sunday evening, I asked the major question of whether content is king in today’s era? Fittingly, another blogger commented moments later that it’s all about aggregation. This is why I love the Web in general and blogs in particular. You don’t write things in a vacuum, and you don’t need to wait too long to see if what you are saying strikes a chord or utterly sucks. Oh, you’ll know.
This morning I read on Paid Content about Bear Stearns report on how content aggregation along contextual, vertical lines is the best thing since sliced bread.
Later on today, MTV comes out and says that they will be launching a number of broadband channels along niche verticals.
Like I said: things that make you go hmm…
So with that in mind, here is something I am predicting (probably not alone in this world of 60M blogs):
We are going to see a lot more of this context is king, vertical-themed talk, sort of like everyone, their sister and neighbor refers and plugs to the “long tail” phenomena to explain anything and everything.
Mark my words. Fittingly, I’ve added a “context is king” tag to track developments and keep updates on how the book is coming along.
Disclosure: Of the companies mentioned, I own LOOK and YHOO
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November 28th, 2006 at 1:19 pm
I’m sure you’ve seen this but thought it was apropos. I think they even stole your line ‘context is king’.
http://www.bearstearns.com/bscportal/research/analysts/wang/112706/index.htm
November 28th, 2006 at 2:23 pm
I think it’s fair to say I did not invent it, Al Gore did…
Jokes aside, I did manage to snag the url, but the only ones to benefit from that are GoDaddy…