Interesting take on what constitutes media. That takes it in a different direction than I thought you were going.

In any case, fascinating stuff to consider. Thanks for pointing to so many interesting things!

Sorry for the late response!

Pete Spande’s post got me thinking about a discussion I had a few years ago with an agency friend. She dismissed blogs as something media buyers should care about because she had been to a bunch of silly ones (haven’t we all!). I told her that just because a website or a blog exists doesn’t make it “media” in the sense of media as content that reaches a large audience and, as a result, can support itself with ad dollars from brands who want to reach that audience. Media is defined more by the reach and engagement of an audience, not by the quality of the content. I may write high-quality essays in a journal on my night stand, but — since those essays don’t have an audience — that doesn’t mean marketers should care.

We have always talked about brands and media content (like the Dukes of Hazzard TV show). In fact, if you take all conversations about a particular brand together, certain brands have been a part of “scaled” conversations since before the internet, though it was hard to view those disparate conversations as a single discussion. What the internet, especially social media platforms like blogs or Twitter or My Space pages, has enabled is the aggregation of those conversations (imagine thousands of individuals who share a conversation in the comments section of Digg about Michael Jackson’s death), and given marketers a way to support those conversations with ad dollars. That’s why I see a link between measurable “scale” and becoming “media.”

Thanks for the comments!

In any case, I would urge you to consider Fred Wilson’s discussion about commenters and consider not just brushing someone like me off with a cold shoulder.

I think you’ve got a great blog and I’ve linked to it from various blogs of mine but I don’t really see that happening in the future.

He’s saying that we’ve always discussed media but he and you seem to be ignoring the fact that the discussions themselves weren’t part of the media before, they were an outside response that was taken into account in the next round of media production. Now that they’re on MySpace or whatever, those discussions are part of the media, i.e. big business has learned to monetize our personal exchanges by creating public venues for those exchanges and turning them into media in the sense that Dukes of Hazzard is media.

How is that not different?