Web 2.0 Mash-ups and the New Aggregators

The Challenge of the Public Niche

Search engines became the power brokers of the Web almost overnight in the mid-1990s because they provided a way of organizing the spiraling amount of data on the ever-expanding World Wide Web. At that time the content was still mostly published for public consumption—proofread, professionally designed, written in the third person.

Much of today’s folk content is of interest to very small and well-defined groups, hence the rise of social networking sites, which often limit access to specific people or types of users. Facebook is the rising example of this, with an exploding base of rich-content user pages only accessible to specific groups of “friends.”

There is another type of folk content: information published by non-professionals on specific topics that are meant for a public audience. Many blogs fall under this category. One measure of the public identity might be the composition of the readership: is it mostly people personally known to the blogger? Many of these public blogs play some sort of advocacy function and work to build a community of like-minded readers. Informal networks with similar blogs are common.

Active participation in these niche communities require a certain level of commitment. Blog reading software has made it relatively easy for the savvy user to follow multiple blogs but the average Internet user still doesn’t use these tools. For informal networks with an agenda of some sort—political, religious, technical, craft-related—niche ...