Let me explain to you my headline.
- As you all know, the print newspaper industry is contracting like a melting ice cube planted in the middle of the Sahara.
- Many Old World’s thinkers put the blame on Google. The Mountain View search engine is pictured as the villain, who steals the money from the hands of the content creators (the print newspaper journalists).
- That said, I found something very interesting in one of those anti-Google slams:
If media companies want to compete with Google, they need to look at the source of its power — judging good content, which enables Google to be the most efficient and effective distributor of content. They also need to look at Google’s fundamental limitation — its judgment is dependent on OTHER people expressing their judgment of content in the form of links. Above all, they need to look at sources of content judgment that Google currently can’t access, because they are not yet expressed as links on the web.
The balance of power on the web can shift — but only by understanding what the real sources of power are.
The web link under “can shift” sends us to an imaginative conjecture worth the kingdom of DisneyLand about how newspaper websites could become all of the sudden the masters of links and turn the whole Web around in their favor. But the reason why Internet users favored Yahoo! and Google in the first place is that they have understood their users better than their competitors. Why don’t the newspaper people try this approach?
