The Next Net: Expertise, Authority
Stop playing Whac-a-Mole. Start supporting quality.
The net is yet young and needs to learn from its present failures to build a better infrastructure not just for speaking but also for listening and finding that which is worth listening to, from experts and people with authority, intelligence, education, experience, erudition, good taste, and good sense.
Here is a preview of one nascent example of such a system built on expertise from Samir Arora, the former CEO of Glam. Samir and I bonded a dozen years ago over the power of networks, when he came to my office to show me one history’s ugliest Powerpoint slides, illustrating how open networks of independent blogs at Glam bested closed systems of owned content in a media company. I had been beating the same drum. Glam later imploded for many reasons, among them the change in the ad market with programmatic networks and investor politics.
Next Arora quietly set to work on Sage, a network of experts. It’s not public yet — he and his team plan to open it up in the first or second quarter — and it’s a complex undertaking whose full implications I won’t fully understand until we see how people use it. But as before, I think Arora is onto an important insight.
