The Recommendation Engine is the new network

Sometimes it can be a bit frustrating watching the big stories break and not being able to find an angle to get involved. I'm not one of those fly-by-night bloggers who is happy to comment on all things and everything - I have an agenda around widgets and I want to construct a story that takes us forward. So I watch and wait, because I know that ultimately, everything is about widgetization.
And today the waiting pays off as Jeff Jarvis spills the beans on  The NBC/Fox gigadeal on video from a widgety perspective.

The two networks/studios are creating a new company to distribute TV on the sites where large audiences already are: AOL, MySpace, Yahoo, MSN. All their entertainment video and some of their movies will be available there for people to embed in their own pages. This means that a MySpace user who’s an Office fan could put up a widget allowing her readers to watch the clips and even the shows on her page. The joint venture will create a destination site for all this, but this isn’t a portal play; it’s about finding a tolerable — for them — way to distribute content via fans’ sites. I’m told that it’s likely this video also may be made available for embedding on lowly blogs such as this — and obviously, I think that will be key.

Jeff's point is that the game now is not about destination sites, it's about us, the masses, acting as a filter to search out and make available what works, the best stuff, the stuff that matters. We en masse will do this more efficiently than any algorithmn. But only if we have total freedom to pick and choose exactly what we want to embed:

They will blow it if they try to maintain too much control: if they give us only their shows, if they insist on which clips we can embed, if they don’t open up to more programming, if they don’t open up to our putting this stuff in our space (not just Rupert’s MySpace). So we’ll see.

And mark this terminology: we'll be hearing a lot more about it in the coming years:

But it’s all about the recommendation engine as the new network.

 

Comments

[Ty Graham]

Oh, just wanted to add that Obama clip on youtube that got 2 million or so views in a manner of a few days is just the beginning of the personal explosive power we as a people are realizing. It used to be said that the pope seen more people or was seen by more people than any living person in the world at the time. What happens when the average joe creates something that spreads his face or his work around the globe and reaches more people than the pope has in a matter of minutes or hours? What is to be said of that sort of power? How will the widget world regulate that the new instant distribution channel that will exist? It's not TV. It's not interactive TV. It's something else. Lets say Obama wins the primaries and someone toots that video as having influence in that election. That kind of recommendation engine is unreal and is of a greater benefit than what the NBCs etc... are doing yet it follows the same rules of DIY content distribution. Anyone who tries to control this market will not succeed. One main reason is that there will be too many players and 'embedding content into the pages of the people' is what we can do today to imagine how the recommendation engine will work but it's not the only method. Eventually the person is going to get tired of all those widgets crowding their page up or the viewer is going to have to view so many non-standard page layouts they will flock to places like youtube because they know how to visually get to the content through a standardized widget display system, which is really what youtube is. But youtube lacks the recommendation engine IMO and that's why soon, everyone is going to get blipd.

[Ty Graham]

Man, this is another knock-out post! I think they will blow it though, it would take an outside company not connected to any media influence to deliver neutral tools for the mass to be the distribution partners of the media. A prime example of the potential can be morbidly compared to how fast saddam's execution cell phone video spread underground from cell, video, blog, newspaper then to tv in a matter of a few hours or less. The communication was so tight that the content was transmitted to every influential person within a relatively small network of people which caused that video to tip. If such a social media network were to exist automatically, and not tied down to the weight of the 'media' then the digg effect may just turn one little blip into an overnight success. It's a tough call to say when, but soon, everyone is going to get blipd.