Why the revolution always happens outside the walls

Another Jeff Jarvis post, this one on Bubble Generation, gives some insight as to why companies like ours come onto the market, and why incremental change just ain’t enough.

From the book BubbleGeneration blog:

Sometimes, when industries are being disrupted by radical
innovations, you have to rely on intuition – and have the confidence to
build analysis on it.

Like media: looking at the innovation
landscape, and seeing Blogger, Technorati, podcasing, OurMedia,
Wikipedia, OhMyNews, etc, it’s not exactly following a risky hunch to
understand that micromedia is going to fundamentally reshape media
economics in simple ways (namely, that supply explodes relative to
demand, and so media deflation is an almost unavoidable short-term
consequence). What’s far riskier, if you ask me, is relying on metrics
that read obsolete industry economics – metrics that are themselves
about to be disrupted.

Hmm. Metrics like circulation? Like readership? Like pageviews?

Jarvis sums it up:


It’s not just that you get distracted by the cash but you also get misled by measuring success and failure by old metrics.

Mike Orren is the Chief Product Officer of The Dallas Morning News; President of Belo Business Intelligence; husband to Crystal Orren; and a Mungarian at Munger Place Church in Dallas, TX. All opinions herein are mine alone.