In the September 15 edition of the Pajamas Media's Blog Week In Review podcast (where I moonlight as producer), Glenn Reynolds, Austin Bay, and David Corn discussed the implications of sites such as MySpace, a website in which Rupert Murdoch has invested $580 million. Known for his earlier funding of television and print mediums, Murdoch is betting — big time — that web formats such as MySpace are the future.
These types of sites typically offer social networking opportunities, as well as lots of user-created content, including personal profiles, blogs, photos, and also user-created music and videos. Discussing Murdoch's investment, The BBC writes:
Young people "don't want to rely on a God-like figure from above to tell them what's important," Mr Murdoch said."And to carry the religion analogy a bit further, they certainly don't want news presented as gospel.
"Instead, they want their news on demand, when it works for them. They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it. They want to question, to probe, to offer a different angle."
The result is a densely interwoven community, which its adherents — 14 million a month, by some measures — say is highly addictive.
Also betting on this format, if possibly not quite as lavishly as Murdoch, are Jeffery Pucci and Richard Viard. After attending Berklee College of Music in Boston, careers as professional musicians, and founding SmarterKids.com -- a Nasdaq-listed e-commerce business later acquired by California-based school supply company Excelligence Learning in April 2001 — their current venture is a site called Nextcat.
Pucci describes Nextcat as "a place for both established and aspiring entertainment professionals to advance their career," adding that he and Viard's goal was "to create a community where these people can show their work, network amongst their peers, seek and offer services, and possibly promote to a fan base too, although we consider that last point to be 'Phase 2,' or of a lower priority presently."
Focusing On The Entertainment Professional
While on the surface, Nextcat's functionality may be somewhat similar to MySpace, its narrow focus on the entertainment professional is radically different. Pucci says "while MySpace has proven to be very useful for a band, for example, to broadcast a message to a large fan base via bulletins, the site is a little chaotic for professionals to do any serious networking. I think MySpace is great for what it is, but the target user is different, and entertainment industry pros are typically not networking with colleagues there. Nextcat will never have 100 million users like MySpace, but it doesn't need to - nor could it, with the exclusive professional focus that we have."
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