From the Warren Ellis email newsletter Bad Signal:

Combat Big Media Hubs

bad signal
WARREN ELLIS

This is something I was talking about with a friend on a
private forum last night. It's been in my head for a couple
of weeks. I'm going to road test the notion here.

Combat big media. Use the web.

Every day, people release new creative work on to the web.
Prose, essays (often in blog form), art, photography, music,
animation, video, spoken word, whatever. The web, and a
bunch of free or cheap tools, gives the creator access to
the full spectrum of media for web broadcast.

LiveJournal gives you the ability to subscribe to other LJs,
which you read on a dynamically updating page - your own
channel of selected content.

Expand that up a bit.

Take Dr Joshua Ellis' notion of "taste tribes," small
communities connected by a shared aesthetic.

Now, you and your tribe -- and if you're all on Tribe.net,
you can grab a bit of code from the site that displays you
all on a sidebar on your website -- select out the content
streams on the web you like. Your favourite online comics,
the internet radio stations you like, the artists who put new
mp3s and art and photography on their sites, etc.

You grab some webspace. Your Hub, if you like.

And you cause to be created a system whereby the Hub is
informed when one of your selected sites updates. The way
a blog puts a new entry at the top. The way a new piece by
a favoured LJ appears at the top of your Friends page.

You've just built a multimedia channel in webspace.


If you feel like it, you can nail some community software onto
it, like Beehive. And you've got the place on the web where
your tribe is, in real time. At the very least, you could set up
to launch IMs off the site. Make your friends' information
invisible to the public, set up an account with Ipipi, and you can
SMS your friends' mobile phones from off the site (I set up a
system like that for a private community earlier this year).

Hell, there's not even any need to make the Hub public, if you
don't want to -- put the whole thing behind a password gate.
But if you do make it public, you can construct a powerful
evangelism tool for the content you like. Use it to create
awareness of your favourite artists, even set up PayPal
donation points.


It's your full-spectrum multimedia channel. It's the TV-killer.
It's the advertising-killer. It's all free original material selected
by you and the friends you share tastes with.
Your Combat Media Hub.

I'm on the Treo at the pub, so I don't have the link to Josh's
original "taste tribes" article, but a quick Google should bring
it up.

There could be great big holes in this, but I figure the idea's
worth road-testing in any case.

-- W

Lot to think about eh?