The Week in Web Content

The tension between what the Valley thinks we should be doing on the web and what is actually emerging in web content was played out across the web last week. To the Silicon Valley observer, the future is built by technological innovation.

To those of us with some distance, the future is being formed by what you communicate as much as how. The Web 2.0 commentator community (think Techcrunch, GigaOm, etc) fixates on the emerging web world as a technology-driven future.

In the end though, it's about content, and content will reflect the diversity of views and interests of web users, rather than the interests and familiar knowledge base of the Silicon Valley elite.

That happens to be a subject that arose in different ways in the past seven days. It became a good week for finding sites that point the way forward. One that's been unduly ignored is Sellaband.

Sellaband have an intriguing way of taking the venture capital and financier out of the content development business. So cool is it, I'm tempted to try myself. Sellaband work with music acts to raise money for top-ine professional production - in essence you, the band, and Sellaband, the site, work together to sell $10 lots in future recordings.

Of course it's a punt, but at $10 why not? And if you know people with lots of $10 then it makes life easier. It could be a model for VC workarounds.

In the same vein - finance - this was a week when a couple of commentators started asking why the tech vcs are investing in pure content plays and equally why the Web 2.0 hype machine is moving in on content, having exhausted the possibilities of beta technology. Alarm Clock ran a poll which is worth a second of your time.

Article Author: Haydn Shaughnessy

A journalist and critic, Haydn writes on where the web's going as well as on the impact of the digital on art and culture. He also does a bit of food writing over at TheDietCast.com.

Visit Haydn Shaughnessy's author page