A new economy of Links & APIs, and the Interdependent Content Ecoysystem

It feels like things are moving increasingly fast now - the global economic crisis has either really catalyzed people and companies into action, or it has completely paralyzed them; but there is no way to stay neutral. On my end, I am certainly seeing a lot more demand for the development of immediate (2-3 years) future scenarios than ever before - guess that's a good thing!

A new kind of currency is developing, and it's based on how connected, appreciated, vetted & verified and available you are. This can be expressed in a myriad of ways, including via the number of links that you are getting, the amount of followers and retweets you are getting (however superficial that may seem, at this early stage), the number of people that subscribe to your blog feed, and if you run a network, how many companies are building your business on-top of yours (i.e. via the use of APIs). Of course, beyond that rather primitive approach of pure volume and easily trackable stats lurks the much tougher question of real meaning, context, merit and quality, i.e. it is really the quality of every single node in your network is what matters, not just their sheer number.

While this Link Economy (see Jeff Jarvis) is, of course, not new, it is certainly getting a real boost from the likes of Twitter and Friendfeed where it appears that good links do matter a lot, and some Twitter search results now often trump good old Google search results. This "you are what you share" mantra is, of course, just one expression of the Web'whatever.0' principle of "success is the result of adding value not extracting value";  and clearly those that add the most value now get the most mentions i.e. links or retweets etc.

If this feels a bit like some kind of race to you I can definitely sympathise but would venture to say that we will see the normalization of this process within the next 9-12 months, just like we did with SEO which is now a pretty well-established routine and feels less like a constant race.

Another important point has been raised by Umair Hague several times in the last few months (and yes, I have been busy applying the 'Proudly Found Elsewhere' principles to his blog posts;), and that is the fact that we seem to be moving into an Interdependent Ecosystem, and away from what I like call the traditional EGOsystem.

In the Content & Media and TIME sectors it will simply no longer work to focus on driving revenues and profits just for oneself, and based only on one's own assets and capabilities. Instead, in the future, revenue streams will need to be discovered, invented, generated, nurtured and maintained in collaboration with other key players in the Ecosystem.  This is a key point for me: we won't have recurring and scalable new generatives in the content business unless we all help to build them, in the first place. There IS no model we can apply, yet, there is no set way to cook this dish, there are no charts to play off - t

here's only improvisation until we have a new song. Stay tuned!

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