Diversity Is Power For Specialized Sites
from the interesting-reading dept
Found over at Declan McCullough’s Politech is this column written by Jakob Nielsen. Nielsen is famous mostly for his writings on website usability. However, this article talks about the power of smaller, specialized sites. His argument is that for all the fear about the latest FCC media ownership rules, the web still has quite a bit of diversity – and the power of the big news organizations may be overblown. While people point out that the “top” sites in certain categories get all the links and attention, Nielsen points out that if you take a look at any segment of the internet (such as sites on a specific topic) the same distribution pattern appears. His point is that these “specialized” sites have power within their own niches. So, while someone may complain that a certain site doesn’t get the overall attention it deserves, within a niche it has the ability to become quite powerful and influential on that specific topic – something that larger, more general sites have difficulty accomplishing. Basically, this is a very good (and somewhat convincing) argument not to worry about the overall power of large media groups. They may have a lot of overall power, but specialty sites can easily beat them on specific topics of interest.
Comments on “Diversity Is Power For Specialized Sites”
No Subject Given
The problem is that with the vast diversity of web “news” sites, very few are considered credible. Most show a tilted view on any subject. This is fine for those who WANT to believe what the site has to offer, but the “masses” will revert back to the media giants because their reputation is perceived as telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. What a joke that is… The masses are important because of their votes or at the very least eliminating any resistance to the politician’s agenda. The masses do not think but rather follow blindly as has become evident with the ignorance of the common man towards current events happening around them. A single source of information being fed to them will be a very bad thing. Getting a hundred, or thousand “specialized” views sounds like chaos as well. The fact is, the system we had was better then this media giant takeover scenario. This has only been changed to allow “The Corporation” to position itself for an easy takeover of our country, freedoms, and futures. Sounds like an old sci-fi flick.
Re: No Subject Given
Yeah! Right on. Like we only get 30 minutes of TV news in a day. And we can only think what the big three corporations, ABC, CBS and NBC tell us to think, because there’s no competition.
You know, it’s not 1960 anymore.