I spent the last few days at the NetSquared conference in San Jose, discussing and blogging about the intersection between the social web and the emerging community of non-profit and for-profit social enterprises that are delivering new, media-rich solutions to problems of social justice, government transparency, and environmental sustainability. As it has become clear over the last few years through this conference, many of the best solutions from this sector are coming in the form of mashups—aggregations of disparate data sources into applications that provide new views on social problems. Most of the mashups featured at this year’s conference involved merging multiple sources of publicly available, government-produced data—frequently, in tandem with Google Maps, whose API has proven wildly popular for visualizing the real-world effects of legislative decisions or governmental incompetence, for example.
In the middle of all this richness, we learned this week that the New York Times is planning to release an API to make it possible for third-party developers to access its vast database of original content. It made me wonder what these talented developers at the NetSquared conference would be able to do with such a repository. And what would it mean to the New York Times specifically to have such talent set loose to figure out how to unlock the undeniable value hidden away in its vaults?
Setting aside the Times for the moment, for most publishers currently the idea of techies extracting the juice out of their archives might seem like the final straw—the last insult and injury that puts them out of business. That’s because—for print publishers specifically—their main acquaintance with concept of APIs is via RSS, which is a very low-level specification that nevertheless allows people to get pretty high value out of their content. Because they have added no value on top of this spec, RSS has played a central role in driving down the value of copyrighted content, making it virtually impossible for topical information providers—say, the Times—to charge users for anything at all for their expensive talent and labor.
But real programmatic interfaces that allowed third-party developers to create innovative, automated mashups from different, high-value content sources would undoubtedly lead to a breakthrough in media creativity that would be worth real money, and would spawn an entirely new class of killer media applications that would revitalize the case for investing in professionally produced content. When people drop the phrase, “Web 3.0,” they are referring precisely to this—content databases with programmatic interfaces that talk to each other. What they don’t say, though, is just how revolutionary this development could be for anyone who believes in the content business and has the imagination to reach outside of the four walls of their own enterprise to embrace new partners who can help them create new and exciting products that people will want to pay for.
