Large followings’ advantage
Put together on November 8, 2009 1:43 pm by Dimitris
What do you think?

- Image by National Library NZ on The Commons via Flickr
In a previous post I mentioned that most of the Greek TV channels main asset is live content: sports and music events is content that cannot be found elsewhere (neither online nor in competitors) so it keeps viewers faithful to their brand.
But that’s not entirely true: live content is not their only remaining major asset much as TV channels like to think so.
They have something else – the effect you get when many people start and keep following a source of information (in whatever medium). It doesn’t matter how bad or good the information quality is, people will still follow it unquestioningly exactly because everyone else is following it.
It’s the same with the Financial Times (you read them to see what’s the information everyone else is getting), it’s the same with Fox News (you watch it to see how mass opinion is formed even though it’s well known it’s biased), it’s the same with sites like Techcrunch (you read their blog to understand what’s on the tech sector map currently – regardless of a million other worthy news that go uncovered by it) and the list goes on.
It’s basically about the basic need that we (or at least some of us) have to belong in some sort of social group – and sharing a news source enforces this. In other words, if everyone at your office keeps talking about how fun or interesting was yesterday’s X show on TV, if you don’t want to stand out too much from that crowd of your peers, you will eventually watch that show too in the weeks to come.
So if you’ve managed to create a considerable following you have – as a bonus – this card to play too. Of course this can only last so long and providing a relatively low signal-to-noise content can burn this asset too.
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We therefore decided to make a tool that strips away the things we didn't like about existing services. To do this, we've worked on technology that allows the user to enhance pages in-line. The user's content lives as a native part of the page, not 'out-of-line' in a side bar or non-native content layer. In the 'first layer' as you put it. We think that gives a different level of control and power to the user, gives a different value to their content, and rids us of the heavyweight UI elements of previous services in one swoop. We let people share their enhancements with others...so you can follow people of interest, and their enhancements get merged into your view of the web.
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