Posted by Stephen Larson
Our-Hometown, Inc.

The point "Much of this information will not be created or handled by journalists, sales professionals or anyone else at the media company. The work will be performed by customers providing content and advertisers using online self-service tools." alone convinced me spending $100 and reading 96 pages would be a complete waste of money and time.

An average advertiser might be able to write text ads but making these ads work for more than used cars and other classified type items takes more than spewing a few words. AdWords for one is not as simple as Google makes it out to be. Then there are display ads, audio and video. Most business people who want to advertise couldn't name a graphics program let alone audio and video editing programs. Even if they could name a program what they could produce would be a joke. Professionals will always be needed.

Readers providing content is another joke. Most blogs are simply comments on what traditional professional media produce. Slugging through tons of half witted forum entries to find a few that were entered by someone that really knows the subject is not going to cut it for the average reader. Professionals may use them for leads but the amount of totally off base entries I've seen in forums requires a professional or someone that really knows the subject to dig out the good stuff.

I'm not saying work on newspapers isn't needed but user generated content (as a product or advertisement) isn't the answer.

The API got what it paid for, a clean presentation of the hottest things out there, not an insightful, innovative blueprint. Today's fads can be expensive to follow and will fade. How about anticipating what will be or could be hot in the future?



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