Publishing 2.0, Part Deux! (Adrian Holovaty, Structured Content, & Vertical Prediction Markets)

so this was supposed to be the amazing "other shoe drop" followup from my previous "Publishing 2.0: It's Not What You Think" post a month ago, riffing on Dan Farber's post (stole his photo too ;)  however i'm way overdue on getting this post done, and since then there's been a few notable things / posts that have happened:

• 1) i helped GigaOm launch a smokin' job board (nods to CrunchBoard, 37Signals, & SimplyHired for inspiration)
• 2) Seeking Alpha got funded by Benchmark, and closed a deal with Yahoo Finance
• 3) Adrian Holovaty and several other smart folks already posted on similar  Publishing 2.0 topics & stole all my thunder.   

damn.  damn those smart-ass alpha geeks all to hell i say!

to be more specific: Adrian posted a more intelligent summary of structured content than i ever could, and suddenly i had a lot less to get up on a soapbox about.  (for a few examples of my more famous soapbox posts, see my doozies on GoogleBase World Domination and ye old infamous Vertical Walled Gardens i wrote while at SimplyHired, replete with images from All Your Base, Highlander, and Guns Germs & Steel... damn, can i plagiarize and steal licensed imagery, or what?!?)

so, in lieu of some glorious rambling long post where i reveal the True Nature of the Universe (A: 42), i'll take the "mathematical approach" (cough) here and see if i can compress my thinking into a few short sentequations for the rest of you Mortals to consume... here goes.

What Publishing 2.0 is, and what it is not.

• Publishing 2.0 1.5 is about going online, lowering costs, aggregating audience, and a million little GigaOm, TechCrunch, and Seeking Alphas beating up on Publishing 1.0 dinosaur empires
• Publishing 2.0 is NOT about the above, it's about Structured Content
• Structured Content = Structured Data
• Structured Data -> Vertical Applications
• Vertical Applications -> Vertical Community
• Vertical Community + Viral Marketing = Network Effects
• Network Effects = Lowest-Cost Bestest-in-Class “Whatever”
• Vertical Community -> Social Networks
• Social Networks = User-Generated Content + Tagging + Rating
• Structured Data + Vertical Apps + Social Networks = Prediction Markets
• [All of Above] = Vertical Prediction Markets for Best-in-Class “Whatever”

In summary: Publishing 2.0 is about using structured data to create vertical applications for domain-specific communities, and ultimately to create domain-specific content networks that discover / promote the best & most valuable "whatever" in the world… and with enough community & transaction data, can predict what's likely best & most valuable in the future.

thus to paraphrase Doc Searls and James Surowiecki: Conversations are Markets.

(more about this stuff later.  have to go build a few startups first...)

Comments

[daveschappell]

Wow, Dave -- I'm reading this a little bit late, but this was a fantastic post. And the link to Adrian's post made it the perfect two-fer. I look forward to discussing this at much greater length with you, because although 7 months have elapsed, I don't think the window of opportunity has been cracked as of yet.