AR&D - Audience Research and Development

Meanwhile, there are some genuinely exciting things happening and one in particular that I think puts the others in perspective. As I wrote about yesterday, Dave Winer's new passion has profound ramifications for the news business, because if you can far enough downstream on it, you'll understand that it eliminates the need for a middlemanesque platform. No TV signal. No newspaper. No Website.

Doc Searls understands this and has written a MUST-READ entry on the subject. Please, folks, do yourself a favor and spend some time pondering the metaphors that Doc uses, for this is his gift (and he's one HIGHLY gifted fellow). It'll help you see beyond all the headlines about this and any other new development that comes down-the-pike. Here's a sample:

"River of news" usefully combines three metaphorical frames: place, transport and publishing. Using all three, it proposes an approach to publishing that respects the fact that more and more people are going to want to get fresh newsy information on handheld Web devices.

The River of News metaphor not only speaks a new kind of sense to the NYTimes and BBCs of the world. It speaks to a new blog sensibility as well. I'm starting to think about how I might want to change my blog to be more Webphone-friendly. Can I live without all the junk on the left and right margins, for example? (Probably. They're worse than useless to readers with Treos and Blackberries.) Alternatively, should I have a special feed just for Webphones?

Whatever the answers, I'm not thinking about my blog, or what it does, as a "site". Meanwhile, that's how most big publishers think about what they do on the Web. That's why their sites are often so chock full of... stuff. They're all about being sticky and holding your eyeballs inside the sitewalls. That might be fine on a computer screen, which is big and placelike in the sense that it usually isn't moving around when you're using it. But a Blackberry or a Treo or a Nokia 770 is different. It's mobile. It's going somewhere. You use it in a much different way.