unmediated

Media Futures

The blog world is starting to produce some really interesting thought pieces.

A case in point is Seth Goldstein's five part treatise on Media Futures.

We are waiting for the finale, to be titled Arbitrage.  I suspect it will be a fitting conclusion.

But the leadup is really quite brilliant and alliterative too.

Starting with Automata, Seth lays the foundation for his vision of a world of participatory media.

Then with Algorithm, Seth starts hitting his stride, laying out the essential ingredients for his vision.

In API, we get to the glue that stitches the vision together.

And in the truly "must read" Alchemy, we understand that this new world is fundamentally differnet and building companies in it requires a new apprpoach.  I must share with you this Pierre Omidyar quote from Alchemy because it says it so well.

So people often say to me - "when you built the system, you must have known that making it self-sustainable was the only way eBay could grow to serve 40 million users a day." Well… nope. I made the system self-sustaining for one reason: Back when I launched eBay on Labor Day 1995, eBay wasn't my business - it was my hobby. I had to build a system that was self-sustaining… …Because I had a real job to go to every morning.

I was working as a software engineer from 10 to 7, and I wanted to have a life on the weekends. So I built a system that could keep working - catching complaints and capturing feedback -- even when Pam and I were out mountain-biking, and the only one home was our cat.

If I had had a blank check from a big VC, and a big staff running around - things might have gone much worse. I would have probably put together a very complex, elaborate system - something that justified all the investment. But because I had to operate on a tight budget - tight in terms of money and tight in terms of time - necessity focused me on simplicity: So I built a system simple enough to sustain itself.

Via A VC