Back in April, Jason Kottke explained why syndication isn't what RSS is about. Ross Mayfield, commenting on this post, said:
What’s changing is the economics of group formation and property. A syndicate is a group or association with rights to redistribute. The cost of group formation has fallen to the point where the marginal cost of adding or losing a member is nominal, so individuals dynamically organize networks. It turns out that the most valuable form of personal property is, indeed, personal. When a house is on fire, you save your photos. We value content in the context of social capital, as converation. Our peers encourage the production for the commons. The abundance of free leaves little scarcity only for the spot (e.g. real-time market feeds) and that differentiated by reputation. It's a powerful force for vertical disintegration. It also drives the local entropy reversal that lets more complex forms emerge. A symbiotic relationship between content and reader/writer or forming syndicates that are less association and more group. (my italics)
Now, as Technorati passes the 3 million mark of blogs ratified, Jeff Jarvis (in a comment to an earlier posting by Ross Mayfield) notes:
We need to define new metrics. This medium isn't about impressions; it's about relationships; it's about conversations; it's about influence; it's about authority. We are starting to measure how many conversations a blog starts (or at least takes part in) with Technorati. But it's just a beginning.
Then there's this from Ross Mayfield (8 July):
What's different with new media is simply that it's not the number of impressions you make, but who you impress. In other words, instead of subscription counts, its the number of subscribers my subscribers have, discounted by the probability of my memes getting through. Cost Per Influence.
And, finally, this from Michael Sippey:
At some point a smart media buyer is going to wake up to this fact: that it's not about how wide an individual meme maker can spread the seed, but how deep he can plant it into his/her first degree network, and those folks into theirs, and those folks into theirs, etc. ... Somewhere, someone is building a mechanism to describe this behavior and play not only the supplier side of the market, but the demand side as well.
