Self Forming Content Networks

I am a big fan of the network model (disaggregated media) as opposed to the command and control model (traditional media). Interestingly, there was an article in last weekend's NY Times talking about the emerging network model of warfare and how it is causing problems for countries like ours who use a command and control approach to warfare.

But that is a digression.

When it comes to networks, the most powerful model is the self organizing network. That allows participants to move seamlessly between networks and takes out all the overhead of managing them.

But we really haven't seen self organizing media networks take hold. Adsense is a self organizing network for publishers and advertisers, but not for the readers/consumers. You can't put together a page that shows all the content that an email marketing ad has appeared on. You might be able to use search to do that, but it's certainly not a seamless process.

So where am I going with this? To FeedBurner of course.  Last week FeedBurner launched a beta version of its self organizing content and advertising networks. You may have seen a box on the right sidebar of this blog that says "Proud Member of Venture Capital Network". That's because this blog is now a member of the Venture Capital Network on FeedBurner. At this point, the Venture Capital Network has 13 blogs and almost 50,000 subs.

Here's the cool thing. FeedBurner didn't put this network together. We did. We being Brad Feld, who is the "coordinator", and the rest of us who joined him. Brad blogged about it last night and he has the details of how it works and what the benefits are to everyone involved.

The Venture Capital Network is great and I hope all 65 VC blogs join it. But think about the power of this. There are >360,000 feeds produced by >220,000 publishers on FeedBurner. You want to form the Sewing Network, the Garage Music network, the Scuba Diving network, or basically the anything network, you will be able to do it on FeedBurner when the self organizing networks feature rolls out to everyone next month.

I am excited to see this happen and I am excited to be a member of the Venture Capital network. But more than that, I am excited to see self forming media networks develop. Because they are the future of media.