Web 2.0 Summit flashback

On Day Two, an embarrassing moment:  Ning CEO Gina Bianchini fumbles with the computer for an interminable 10 minutes, trying to get a demo to work, while Marc Andreesen looks awkward and John Battelle paces back and forth.  Finally John does the humane thing and pulls the plug on the demo.  We broke for lunch.

But when the two tried again a few hours later, the demo was pretty impressive: With Ning, as you probably know, you can set up a customized social-networking site in just a few minutes.  Some of the implications of what Mark and Gina were announcing were muddied by the fumbled delivery.  But I’ve been thinking about their stuff since, and it seems to me Marc may once again be on to something.

Earlier this year, our company did a bunch of research on the blogosphere and found some pretty astonishing numbers:  There were 50 million blogs and they were growing at a rate of 5 percent per week. At that rate the law of large numbers has got to kick in.  Nothing can sustain that kind of growth for very long. Which begged the question: "Then what?"

So here are Marc and Gina showing how in 5 minutes you could create a kind of MySpace for social blogging, built around a topical area of interest. Suddenly I had flashbacks of Steve Case and Mark Walsh, somewhere back around 1998, arguing that "communities of interest" were going to be the basis of commerce. 

Bingo. 75 million undifferentiated blogs are not digestible, consumable or even comprehensible.  It's like matter floating in space after the Big Bang. Soon enough, though, all that matter will clump.  It will begin to be attracted to itself (it's already happening, with trackbacks, tags, etc.) and ultimately begin to consolidate.  The blogosphere will coalesce the way our universe did around centers of gravity:  Topics, social issues, news issues, entertainment interests, etc. 

Galaxies, suns and planets will form.  We won’t blog solo as we do today. We'll blog as communities, and the social-network wiki is the model Marc has correctly taped into.

Why is this relevant to the future of news?  Because in the news business you need an audience, and a way to monetize your labors. Creating news product for the online readership(s) of 75 million undifferentiated blogs just isn’t practical. 

But -- here's is the good part -- if Marc and Gina are right and we begin to blog as communities, then you begin to have audiences.  And then c-journalists (not to mention commercial news publishers) can begin to think about products that can satisfy the news needs of "blog clumps" living in social networks built around areas of interest.  Now we’ve got something that might make business sense.

It's interesting to speculate about a future where social clumps of bloggers coalesce around sites, and where c-journalists provide the materials and the news which feed and propel the community.

And it's interesting to speculate about whether Marc and Gina are the only ones thinking along these lines, what with Yahoo! talking to MyBlogLogs ...