Diversity Is Power For Specialized Sites
from the interesting-reading dept
Found over at Declan McCullough's Politech is this column written by Jakob Nielsen. Nielsen is famous mostly for his writings on website usability. However, this article talks about the power of smaller, specialized sites. His argument is that for all the fear about the latest FCC media ownership rules, the web still has quite a bit of diversity - and the power of the big news organizations may be overblown. While people point out that the "top" sites in certain categories get all the links and attention, Nielsen points out that if you take a look at any segment of the internet (such as sites on a specific topic) the same distribution pattern appears. His point is that these "specialized" sites have power within their own niches. So, while someone may complain that a certain site doesn't get the overall attention it deserves, within a niche it has the ability to become quite powerful and influential on that specific topic - something that larger, more general sites have difficulty accomplishing. Basically, this is a very good (and somewhat convincing) argument not to worry about the overall power of large media groups. They may have a lot of overall power, but specialty sites can easily beat them on specific topics of interest.
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You know, it's not 1960 anymore.
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