Widgets, people and the web

Dave Cushman presented his thoughts on how people become the key distributors of information in the networked society

Dave mentions Reed's Law - the law of group forming networks. Another thought that has crossed my mind is that there is a great deal of discussion around self-serving advertising engines, again this is the start of how the role of commercial messaging will evolve in this social interactive media ecology. In my view open api's and widgets, being used within the context of Reeds Law - defines a new paradigm of marketing, communication and commerce.

For example David asks

Who gets to create content?
Any and everyone
Who gets to distribute content?
Any and everyone
Who controls the user experience?
The user is the destination now, they control their ownA-to-anywhere journey

And, in (social) networks the broadcast message doesn’t arrive because are already looking at, and pointing to and, talking to each other.

Different model see to a captive audience - They aren’t your groups, they are theirs. They aren’t your messages, they are theirs. Marketing is not done to them, it is done by them.

And yet we are still trying to stuff the same old furniture of advertising into a completely different model of communication.