Web 2.0 is all about connectivity. The content pyramid has been turned
upside down. It used to be there were a few powerful “information
dictators” that controlled the channels through which we received our
information.

The scarcity was in the barriers to entry to mass
communication. Millions and billions of dollars to buy air time over
television, radio and print-media.

Those barriers are gone.
Anyone with a computer, within a few minutes (literally) set up a web
page and have the potential to reach millions of people all over the
world.

So, turning things around and putting content creation in
the hands of consumers creates another problem. There is TOO MUCH OF IT!

A need to filter all this stuff then arises.

It
turns out that web 2.0 technologies and communities are very good in
filtering the wheat from the chaff through a few core technologies.

1. TagsEvery
   time someone posts a blog, they have the ability to “tag” their post
   with a number of keywords that help categorise the articles.

   Services
   such as technorati subscribe to a millions of blog posts and make note
   of what tags are being used, and use these to categorize posts, and
   often display what is known as a “tag cloud” (one taken from
   technorati.com shown below) to show what’s hot and what’s not.
   

   The
   way it works is that the bigger the size of the font of the tags, the
   more popular it is. This blog post is being written a few weeks before
   Christmas, so it’s no surprise to find that “christmas” and “shopping”
   are two big ones!

   The ability to easily see the real-time trends of the “herd” is priceless from a marketer’s perspective.

   Your
   role is to gather the herd. To find out what they want. To give it to
   them. Well.. now my friend it’s served up on a silver platter.

   Here’s a tag cloud from another service called del.icio.us:

   

   In this case it shows what tags people are using when they bookmark sites using the del.icio.us social bookmarking service.

   This
   is a marketer’s goldmine. Where in the offline world can you get such
   up-to-date real-time trends of what people are interested in. You
   can’t! This is exciting stuff guys and gals!

2. Info-DemocracyThe
   converse to information dictatorships is info-democracy. No longer do
   you have to settle on the news networks deciding what is “new”… now
   the voice of the people can be heard.

   Take for example the website digg.com:

   

   The
   top 3 news stories are there because they had the most popular votes.
   Anyone can submit a link to a news story, but only the top voted stores
   make it to the home page.

   This is a brave new world!

What does this mean for you:

A few things:

You
should be making a regular stop by social bookmarking and tagging sites
to get a “pulse” for the marketplace. Particularly if you are looking
for new niches to get into.

Also, you should consider replicating a democratic news site in your niche.

Many
of the sites that I’ve shown you are probably heavily slanted towards
the technology or early adopter market. But mark my words, they are
becoming more and more mainstream everyday. Three years ago no-one had
heard of a “podcast” - now virtually everyone has.

There are
“white label” software scripts that you can get or you can simply hire
a programmer to build your own digg.com clones for your niche.

Remember, what works for the general market often works in a niche, even more successfully.

You won’t be the next digg.com, or youtube.com but you could be troutfishnews.com or troutfishtube.com and own that market.

Now go forth and conquer.

– Euge

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