the global microbrand rant 2

[Bonus Video Link: Loic Le Meur inter­vie­wing Jeff Jar­vis at Davos recently.]
I sup­pose one of my semi­nal “blog­ger” expe­rien­ces was follo­wing Jeff Jar­vis’ thoughts on what he calls “Explo­ding Media” over the last cou­ple of years.
For all its ama­zing insight, the first thing you have to unders­tand about the Explo­ding Media thread is that it isn’t roc­ket science. To quote Clay Shirky:

“So for­get about blogs and blog­gers and blog­ging and focus on this — the cost and dif­fi­culty of publishing abso­lu­tely anything, by anyone, into a glo­bal medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that inc­rea­sed pool of poten­tial pro­du­cers is going to be vast.”

Yes, it really is that sim­ple. And Jeff was one of the first peo­ple who [A] really unders­tood it and [B] was able to explain it to large amounts of ordi­nary peo­ple.
Jeff gave up his career as a heavy­weight big-media exec a cou­ple of years ago in order to start up a busi­ness hel­ping big media com­pa­nies bet­ter unders­tand this brave new world he and Shirky talk about.
And from what I can tell, he’s done a damn fine job of it.
My favo­rite recent line of his: “I say media com­pa­nies must turn from owning con­tent to ena­bling net­works”.
A worthy goal; it cer­tainly gives one’s brain something to chew on, although I’m not sure if it’s rea­lis­tic, to be honest.
Sure, if some­body like say, Time War­ner wants to help sort out my social thing, bless ‘em, though I’m not con­vin­ced they could do a bet­ter job than much sma­ller, focu­sed com­pa­nies like Six Apart or Word­Press, not to men­tion count­less other blog­gers I know per­so­nally. And the lat­ter don’t have a board of direc­tors, nor vast armies of sha­rehol­ders, cele­bri­ties and emplo­yees to keep fed and wate­red.
Basi­cally, I’m not con­vin­ced this “top-down evo­lu­tion of old media into new media” story, howe­ver fas­ci­na­ting it is to watch, is really all that use­ful to the ave­rage blog­ging sch­moe, trying to make a living in the here and now.
Sure, it might be con­si­de­red “news” to some that Time War­ner now allows its Tom Cruise publi­city nug­gets to be dis­tri­bu­ted via RSS. Or that one of their com­pa­nies, AOL bought out the Weblogs Inc net­work [the lat­ter being a com­pany I have nothing but admi­ra­tion for]. Or that The Guar­dian in the UK has embra­ced blogs in force. But how does the ave­rage per­son take that infor­ma­tion, and turn it into cash to feed his family? And do it yes­ter­day?
Whe­reas, com­pare that to one self-employed guy I know [who shall remain name­less], who isn’t even on the Tech­no­rati 1000, yet every Movable-Type-powered blog post he wri­tes, on ave­rage, nets him $25,000-$50,000 in new busi­ness. What can I say? The lat­ter, what I call “The Glo­bal Mic­ro­brand”, in terms of my own sel­fish needs and ambi­tion, is a far more power­ful and use­ful an idea to me.
I’m not dis­sing Jeff or what he’s doing. Far from it. He’s one of my top-ten or so “must reads”. But I’m not always con­vin­ced that the peo­ple he is paid to help are all that rele­vant to the Glo­bal Mic­ro­brand space.
I guess that’s OK. “Sixty million blog, sixty million busi­ness models” etc.
Just let’s say, as the blo­gosphere matu­res and more high-profile peo­ple start making the big money [e.g. Arring­ton, Cala­ca­nis et al], and big media com­pa­nies start embra­cing Web 2.0 tech­no­logy in all sorts of ways, sure, it makes for enter­tai­ning rea­ding, and it’s a good thing all round to be hap­pe­ning, but neither should we for­get the little guy doing extraor­di­nary things, quietly away in the cor­ner. And utterly trans­for­ming his career in the pro­cess. The lat­ter is to me where the real action is. In terms of pure sel­fish eco­no­mic need, this is where more peo­ple are most likely to suc­ceed.
We live in inte­res­ting times.

[Glo­bal Mic­ro­brand Archive is here.]
[UPDATE: You’ll unders­tand where Jeff Jar­vis is coming from far bet­ter if you watch the Loic & Jeff video, lin­ked above. Thanks also to Loic. Great stuff.]