Content is king, long live Dogparkusa
If you’ve worked in the media industry for any amount of time, you’ve surely heard folks declare “Content is King” more times than you’d care to remember. If you’ve worked in the web world for any amount of time, you’ve also heard your fair share of dissenters declare that if indeed Content is King, then the King’s castle is currently being rushed by a mob of peasants, in the process of breaking down the front gate, looking for their own share of the power, spotlight and good life.
The age of community created content has arrived online and is slowly disrupting everything that old media once held sacred. In the media landscape of a decade or two ago, the creator of great content could make one hell of a connection… who the heck remembers what kind of television they used or what network carried the programming when they watched the last episode of MASH, or Cheers, or their favorite team in the SuperBowl? Uh, no one, but I am sure the content itself made quite an impression. But back then you could also count the number of media outlets on your fingers, and the influence of each was magnified by the scarcity of alternatives.
Up until recently, mobile map content was likely supplied by one of two companies: NAVTEQ or TeleAtlas… not unlike the ABC, CBS and NBC of old. The two companies sat back and decided what they thought the world needed in their maps, invested a bunch of money to go gather that data and periodically publish up the results. Repeating as often as was economically viable and demanded by their customers. Not much different than ABC deciding what the world wanted/needed to watch, and going out and buying shows that appealed to the broadest audience possible and offering up 22 episodes at a pop.
I suspect that we may see the same occur with location data content. While we have seen innovative initiatives like community editing of map data by TeleAtlas, today this is still just focused on the basic blocking and tackling of getting the base map data updated and correct. In order to provide much more rich information about the world, niche specialist will need to step in and become data providers for their areas of expertise… for example the Travel Channel can step in and become the leading provider of information related to popular destinations for tourism, news organizations like CNN will become providers of breaking timely news information related to places, and similar roles for Zagat or Michelin in restaurants, AAA for travel essentials, etc.
At this stage in the game, there may not be enough mobile location aware users to support the next phase of micro niche content creators purely for the mobile location experience, which is why you see folks trying a lot of different approaches with user generated content… either just opening it up to anyone creating content about anyplace, like Platial Nearby (the GeoCities approach), or by trying to limit to content created by someone within your social network, like Whrrl (the Facebook approach), with many trying to offer a blend of both alternatives. Alternatively, you have folks like uLocate not creating content at all, but aggregating what it sees as the “best of” in content and applications not unlike the original directory/portal set up of the early years of Yahoo!
But it’s looking like it won’t be a big leap for many of the niche content creators that have emerged on the web to transition over … take for example the husband and wife team at dogparkusa.com… they along with the community they’ve built, have aggregated information on over 1,600 dog parks across the US. They’ve already done a great job of integrating a mapping element into their website and even use Lat49/Local.com to monetize those web map views. But do you think you’ll find their information when you’re driving around with your latest TomTom or Garmin or Nokia device, or even in one of a myriad of mobile finding apps like Earthcomber, Where or Whrll? No, Not Yet… and I don’t suspect that you will until the mobile location aware equivalent of AdSense/AdWords is invented to make it profitable for both sides to do so.
