Online Media Cultist

I’m guilty of this sometimes. A late afternoon when I’ve had too much coffee and the buffering brain is buzzing from blazing doses of online cultery. I think: what’s left for this whole web thing, web 2.0 or what have you? What’s left to be done that hasn’t yet to be done?

The answer of course is everything… or thereabouts.

One of things that excites me the most about the interwebs, that gets me up in the morning racing for the laptop (and let’s not forget the coffee) is the prospect of finding out about services, platforms, and activities that meet human needs in some kind of new and interesting way.

And something I get particularly geeked out about is innovation within the area of content aggregation – how websites are collecting information and allowing people to share, communicate, and create relationships around that aggregation of information.

Here’s the beauty thing: the amount of content being generated online will vastly increase and accelerate for generations to come, and not only that, but the amount and variety of content being generated will vastly increase and accelerate for generations to come. And keep in mind that it’s pretty increased and accelerated already!

In other words, there’s endless piles of stuff to collect and do something interesting with. And those websites that do the most interesting things will tend to draw audiences and be successful. Which will encourage the next round of innovation, and on and on.

Over only the last two or three years, we’ve seen a massive spike in the number and type of services looking to harness information while providing a community platform and features. Some, like Digg, are already web institutions. Others, like FriendFeed, are leading the charge on a new wave of innovation.

But it’s still just the very beginning.

A Mashable story about a new gaming community called Vigster brought these thoughts to mind:

For each game on the site, users can also give reviews and ratings, begin discussions and layer in as much additional information as possible. That includes screen shots, videos, and other data that could be deemed useful. In this sense, Vigster is much like a wiki for video games . In Vigster’s own words, the community-driven content enables the site to become an “IMDB for video games.”

So you can look at Vigster in one of two ways. You can say: so what, big deal, it’s a little Wikipedia, a little IMDB, a little Shelfari/Amazon, a little Facebook/MySpace and it’s about video games.

Or you can say the above but cut the “so what” and emphasize the big deal. That’s not to say that Vigster is going to set the world on fire – I have no idea if it will or won’t. But what’s important to me is that innovation is based upon iterating on what has already been done while finding a market need.

And then comes both the most fun and hardest part: executing on the idea and producing the best possible expression of the vision.