Producing is nice, aggregating is king

Leave a comment
Good Old Trend

Just in case you forgot (we are going back to 2006, after all). Henrik wrote about it a year earlier than me even.

John Koten, Mansueto ventures:

“Social publishing,” or aggregation, is what pays, Koten says. And in recessionary times, that’s obviously more crucial. Koten: “Having regularly updated, fresh content is different than having people who are trying to break stories five or six times a day.

And it’s still true.

A farewell to exclusivity

Leave a comment
Good Old Trend

I often wonder why so many traditional media companies have missed The Technical Divide, and why the internet changes everything. It’s a million dollar (in lost advertising revenue 😉 question.

I think a part of the problem is not understanding the separation of content and distribution. They used to be tightly interlinked – news (content) through newspapers (distribution), tv-shows (content) and channels (distribution). From that perspective it would make sense to apply the same logic to media on the internet.

But the internet is not a medium – it is a carrier of media. The content is not connected to the distribution in the same way as it used to be. Therefore, producing content that is meant to be exclusive for any one specific channel/space/area is not understanding how the internet fundamentally works.

Proprietary thinking is therefore something of the past. And that’s why business models built on proprietary content will always stop short of what they could have been.

Let’s push things forward

Leave a comment
Good Old Trend

This is not a political blog, but the video clip below is not politics either. It is a profound, and what appears to be sincere, tale of worry about the next few years in America if this coming election doesn’t go the way that it should. It touched me it the same way that this did.

These are rough times. I visited ETRE08 and everyone there was noticeably moved about the current state of affairs (except maybe Tim Draper who sang a different tune, literally). Sure, a few of them worked for investment banks and were probably more worried about their penthouse down-payments more than anything else – but still. Even there, amongst the IT-Davos-esque crowd, something seemed to have changed.

What we need at a time like this is clarity, responsibility and genuine long term thinking. Strategy, if you will. Whether we work for Goldman Sachs, are the former US Secretary of State or – like most people that read this blog – work with the web in some way, it doesn’t matter. We should all address our respective issues with these parameters in mind. I’m glad that a man with such a questionable track record has decided to do so now, at least.

Like electricity for the industry

Leave a comment
Good Old Trend

Without going into lengthy detail about it, there has been a lot of rumblings about laws and restrictions in Sweden lately. I can only add my thoughts on why issues of this kind are turning up more and more often.

I think it’s simply a fact of people not understanding the internet.

The internet has been an intricate part of many peoples lives for a long time. Now, we seem to have reached some sort of tipping point where it can’t be ignored in any social circles any more. People always fear want they don’t understand. This is no different.

Perhaps us living online have been bad at communicating outside our own? It’s considerably easier to complain when people don’t understand than to try and make them understand in the first place. That being said, not understanding is no excuse to be ignorant.

Imagine having a discussion about the industrial revolution and not understanding the concept of electricity.

Fuhgeddaboudit

Leave a comment
Good Old Trend

Okay, so we changed our minds. We’re not selling Good Old. I think it was a good exercise to think about it though, as it forced us to look at our company differently. I saw a company culture forming that I didn’t want to interrupt. Sales figures that were going better than ever. Interesting people wanting to work with us. All in all it felt as if we should continue riding this train as far as it takes us.

I’ve been thinking a lot about talent lately. On how to attract talented people and how to create an environment where they would like to work. Perhaps this is a subject that I’ll come back to during the autumn. At the moment I’m ill and sitting in my sofa feeling sorry for myself, and my brain isn’t quite working the way it should be. It just wanted you to know that the last post wasn’t the end of this blog, so keep that RSS-feed in your reader plz. TTYL.

Good Old Fan Club + How to make an Internet Strategy

Leave a comment
Good Old Trend

If you’re Swedish you might have read the news about Good Old merging with The Fan Club. This means I won’t be CEO any more and can fully focus on internet strategy and advisory work. Yay! And maybe more blogging too. I haven´t quite decided how, where or about what I’ll be blogging though. I’ll get back to you on that. – UPDATE HERE 🙂

Until then, I thought you might to see the presentation that I held at the Business to Buttons conference today. It’s a few thoughts on how to make an internet strategy in the web 2.0 era. Sound would have been good, but the slides give you an idea at least.

tags technorati :

tags bloggar.se: , , ,