About About
: Peter Caputa has some interesting ideas for About.com, suggesting that it become a repository of syndicated blog content, sending revenue to bloggers in return.
I do think there is room — and a need — for such a service but I doubt that About.com is the service to do it.
A few months ago, I had lunch with Tom Rogers, the former head of Primedia who bought About.com, and said in the middle of my usual blog evangelism that if About.com started today, it would be decentralized, not centralized. He agreed. Rogers understood the power of niche content and targeting online. When Scott Kurnit started About and Rogers bought it, the decentralized blog world had not yet exploded. But now it has. Yet About remains a centralized content service, not even a portal to decentralized content.
Do we need such a portal to decentralized blog content? That depends on whether you think people will ever specifically wonder what “blogs” have verus what online “content” has. I don’t think blogs should segregate themselves from the rest of the content world.
But I do think there is opportunity for sophisticated and decentralized ad and content networks and Caputa’s thoughts about grafting such opportunities onto About is an interesting way to frame the discussion. [via PaidContent]
