Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

Blogging gave the long-tail a voice, AdSense gave it pocket money. Both are spurring a wave of innovation which is reshaping the media world around the individual. Three launches that caught my eye over the past couple of  weeks reflect this continued atomization of media and growing sophistication of blogging tools to engage and monetize audience online. Let me pull a thread through these...

1. Edgeio brings the marketplace to the blog and the blog to the market.
Techcrunch power blogger, Michael Arrington unveiled his new venture Edgeio last week. Edgeio is new take on the online marketplace.  It's a bit hard to get your head around so I'll try a simple offline analogy. Say you decide its time to dump your old VW.  You stick a for-sale sign on it. Next your car automatically appears in the  classifieds section in your local paper, bringing it to a much larger audience of VW buyers.  With Edgeio it works like this... bloggers tag any blog post with the word "listing" (turns out the incidence of the tag listing in the blogosphere is insignificant). Edgeio's engine crawls the web and sucks all posts tagged "listing" into it's database. Edgeio cleverly utilizes blog commenting functionality to confirm the listing. Users tap a blogosphere's worth of listings via Edgeio.com

2. 3bubbles brings conversation to the blog.
Second is 3bubbles. 3bubbles brings adds real time conversation to the blogosphere (more here). Simply append a post with a chat link and your readers can join a live conversation instantly. Chats will be aggregated at the 3bubbles site with advertising supporting the service (revenue sharing planned). See it in action here. Just click the "Live Chat" link at the bottom of the  Tech Crunch post. (Tangler, a new service in the works, will aggregate conversation from multiple blogs, a feature they call  "Instant Grouping".)

3. BlogBurst brings bloggers to mass media and mass media to bloggers.
The third, BlogBurst reflects bloggers growing influence in mass media. BlogBurst is an opt in wire service for bloggers and publishers. Bloggers sign up to have their content fed to major media outlets (Washington post, SF Chronicle, San Antonio Express to name a few). Participating publishers have the right to use these posts as they choose as long with accreditation and link backs to the participating bloggers.

For more on the changing media landscape and bloggers role in it, check out Sifry's post, The State of the Blogosphere, February 2006. In particular read about what Sifry calls the "Magic Middle". This is where we will see the biggest impact.

Troy Young