Sunday, March 07, 2004
Guest Post -- Aggregation and the Blog
Today, it's Anand Chandrasekaran's turn to write in his thoughts about aggregation, especially as he applies the ideas of aggregation to blogging.
Aggregation and the Blog
We see it all around us, from movie multiplexes to information portals to malls. Aggregation. It's defined by Merriam-Webster as a : the collecting of units or parts into a mass or whole b : the condition of being so collected.
Since my first conversation with Atanu, aggregation has been at the root of why a model like RISC makes sense to eliminate the co-ordination failure in rural economies. For longtime followers of the PC industry, the horizontalization of hardware VS software and of skill sets around PCs and the software that runs them (away from the verticalization that defined early technology companies like Wang, DEC, Sperry, UNIVAC and even IBM), is another common example of how aggregation can change formative industries.
The effects of aggregation manifest in three ways: scale, scope, and agglomeration. Economies of scale are required to make any concept that employs aggregation practically feasible and extensible, both for end-users and for those who create it. Economies of scope and aggregation are made possible because of the variety of service providers!
In the context of blogs and their proliferation, aggregation seems to be an underlying concept. As I mentioned to Reuben a few days back, blogs will quickly move from being a name to being a place. Topics du jour might differ, but people will hang out in places where they are amused, entertained and even stirred into writing their own opinions. While the economy of scale is a moot point (given the comparitively low costs to achieve scale), the economies of scope and agglomeration and spot-on relevant to making a blog successful.
Guest blogs are a good way to start giving a diverse set of people a good reason to care about a blog. Joi Ito is one example of how blogs are likely to look like! It's probably time to revisit the Cluetrain Manifesto (and its fresh perspectives on keeping a live conversation going with one's customers) in the context of blogging.
By Anand Chandrasekaran
Aggregation and the Blog
We see it all around us, from movie multiplexes to information portals to malls. Aggregation. It's defined by Merriam-Webster as a : the collecting of units or parts into a mass or whole b : the condition of being so collected.
Since my first conversation with Atanu, aggregation has been at the root of why a model like RISC makes sense to eliminate the co-ordination failure in rural economies. For longtime followers of the PC industry, the horizontalization of hardware VS software and of skill sets around PCs and the software that runs them (away from the verticalization that defined early technology companies like Wang, DEC, Sperry, UNIVAC and even IBM), is another common example of how aggregation can change formative industries.
The effects of aggregation manifest in three ways: scale, scope, and agglomeration. Economies of scale are required to make any concept that employs aggregation practically feasible and extensible, both for end-users and for those who create it. Economies of scope and aggregation are made possible because of the variety of service providers!
In the context of blogs and their proliferation, aggregation seems to be an underlying concept. As I mentioned to Reuben a few days back, blogs will quickly move from being a name to being a place. Topics du jour might differ, but people will hang out in places where they are amused, entertained and even stirred into writing their own opinions. While the economy of scale is a moot point (given the comparitively low costs to achieve scale), the economies of scope and agglomeration and spot-on relevant to making a blog successful.
Guest blogs are a good way to start giving a diverse set of people a good reason to care about a blog. Joi Ito is one example of how blogs are likely to look like! It's probably time to revisit the Cluetrain Manifesto (and its fresh perspectives on keeping a live conversation going with one's customers) in the context of blogging.
By Anand Chandrasekaran
