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People often say something to the effect of "networks are dead, we're in a billion channel world now," when referring to Internet/YouTube, etc.
I'm going to postulate that the universe of channels is actually much, much larger than that.
Why?
Because the person is the channel.
The tools are at the point where each and everyone of us has the ability to be a channel.
Say you visit my personal Tumblr site (http://jer979.tumblr.com).
What you are doing is tuning into my channel where you will get
- my personal blog posts
- links I've bookmarked on del.icio.us
- Twitter updates
- videos I've uploaded to YouTube
- shared items from Google Reader
And, over time, as people fine tune the tone of their channels (for example, I need a more business focused channel for my professional life), you will either decide to tune into my channel...or not.
But, if you do, it is because you are interested in/trust my judgment. Like NBC or CBS, I (or you or anyone) will become the arbiter of programming.
Eventually, (and you probably already have) you will find the people who are your channels.
Just a different way to think about it.




Comments
John Porcaro said on 7.02.2008 at 8:17 PM
Excellent point. It comes down to finding people you trust to do some filtering for you. I like that sites like Tumblr make it easier for people to publish recommendations--not as hard to post as blogs, and seems to have a longer life too.