Last year, Technorati said there were 175,000 blogs being created every day.We’re adding to that today with the new Digital Media section of VentureBeat (it’s not really a separate blog, but its a new tab focused only that subject). We hope that you read it because it will be a filter for your daily life on what is important in the world of digital media. This is an experiment for now and we may modify it in coming weeks — so that it may actually become a separate blog.
Every day, we get a blast of news from a fire hose about technology and Silicon Valley. Our job is to intercept that blast, filter out the dreck, and refine what is left for you to consume. One of our filters is to focus on the business and technology associated with the creation, distribution, and consumption of digital media.
I keep saying that phrase digital media. What does it mean? It isn’t covering Britney Spears’ latest run-ins with the paparazzi. But it could be writing about the next cell phone game from Paris Hilton. We hope you’ll get the scoop here first on the key players — the next Facebook, the next Google, the next Pets.com (well, maybe not them) — right here on our little homestead on the Internet. We can dive into the digital business models of industry giants such as Electronic Arts or the social search model of startup Mahalo.
Some of us newshounds and tech followers suffer from a fear that we’re going to miss something important. It’s called “information anxiety.” I get a bad case of it around 3am now and then. I shake it off by playing an hour or so of intense multiplayer online combat. But sometimes you can cruise the web for hours and still not shake that feeling.
It’s probably the same feeling that papparazi get when someone else gets the Britney photo of the day. The good thing, I suppose, is that I’ve got 20 years behind me in trying to be the lead dog in the pack on tech news. All of that time has been at newspapers and magazines, but I’ve blogged for 2.5 years now. I find it to be addictive, engaging.
Our answer is to try to keep up with everything but to only write about what matters. Matt wrote more about my background here. He calls me Dean the Machine. But hopefully, I’ll be one of those smart machines, not a mindless blogging robot crawler.
For my familiar readers, you’ve heard about this filter approach from me before. And, yes, I will still cover the business of video games. We’ll cover the startups and venture capital voices that are the bread and butter of VentureBeat. But we’ll also cover the companies that matter in digital media, big or small. You’ll see stories about Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Apple, Electronic Arts and others. I won’t be writing reviews of gadgets and games in the same way I did at the San Jose Mercury News.
But I will be infusing my knowledge of products into the business stories that we cover. Just how is Apple TV going to work out the second time round? Do people really want to populate their video games with their own creations? Is it worth your time to inhabit a virtual world to see if it is for real? How will Facebook’s quest for revenue interfere with the simple convenience of its site for users? Using knowledge of how tech works, testing products, and talking to the right insiders (and readers!) is how I hope to set this blog (or tab) apart.
I’m excited to be fully embedded inside the blogosphere now. It makes me feel like I’m in the middle of the right place to be. Matt Marshall and his fine team have built a wonderful platform for new media. I’m looking forward to working closely with Matt as well as fellow digital media blog cohorts Eric Eldon and MG Siegler. At the outset, these guys will show me how it’s done because they’ve been running this race for a while now. They know how to get traffic, and, even better, high value readers who are closely engaged inside the digital media space.
We will try to steer clear of the blinding reality-distortion fields and get inside those places where you want us to be. We can tell the most exciting stories but refrain from using too many video game battle metaphors. We hope, most of all, that you’ll steer us in the right direction with your own comments and that we’ll learn about this digital frontier together. Again, we’ll take your recommendations on what to cover in this Digital Media area and evolve our coverage over time — as you advise us.