Democracy comes in to forms: direct democracy (direct referendum) and representative democracy (how most nations are governed). I don’t think it’s applicable to social media.

The question indeed is how much social media will promote a meritocracy. My personal stance is that it enables it, but does not make it inevitable. Lots depends on the behavior of people. Which people/blogs/voices they pay attention to, especially.

@Scott – you are right that rich media will become increasingly important. Probably because it requires less effort to digest, and is therefore more likely to appeal to a wider audience. Getting ranked highly today seems to require a combination of catching attention, and then catching the imagination – and you are right that this will remain difficult. The headline may become king over content..

@Morgan – You hit the nail on the head in terms of the formula that will be required for marketable content in the future. The well thought out pieces will remain niche in terms of coverage – will be interesting to see how they compare in terms of advertising spend.

@Locke – You are right – it will remain a mixture of branding and content. Although we seem to have some more comments now.

@Clif – Very interesting observation! Will definitely dig into that next time around!

@Pedro – It will indeed be interesting to see how the big boys play this one out, and which approach they take. I do see that Yahoo are accepting submissions for other sites (I put my TalkClimateChange blog forward) so perhaps they are going for a spam free, heavily quality controlled version of social media. Interestingly I hear that Yahoo Buzz sends many times the traffic of Digg and the like. Will definitely keep this on the watch list.

Thanks again for sharing your thoughts!

MarK.

Yahoo and affiliated content producers have taken a different tact, however. Instead of embracing this democratic approach and trying to be the best at it, they have deemed social media a threat, and have invested a lot of money into countering it.

At first Yahoo Buzz appears to be just like most other social media sites. A closer look reveals that this could not be further from the truth. Buzz does not allow its users to submit content, so all of the news appearing on Yahoo Buzz comes from within Yahoo’s tight-knit circle of publishers, who (at least on Buzz) do not have to compete with bloggers and smaller content publishers.

I think Yahoo has misjudged the very thing that drives social media, and as a result I expect it will be somewhat of a flop.

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