Web 2 Thy Name is Syndication

I recently had a chance to spend a few days talking with the CEO (David McInnis) and the key investor (angel VC Mark Effinger) in PRWeb (http://www.prweb.com" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"). Now, lately when you refer to Web 2.0 the images that pop to mind are garage-band start-ups run by pony-tailed twenty somethings (albeit, very smart ponytailed twenty somethings) creating some new web community or photo-sharing application. I've lately been fortunate to talk to a lot of these companies, some with obvious investment potential, some that even the owners admit exist solely to scratch an itch. However, when I had a chance to look deep into PRWeb, what I saw was what Web 2.0 companies will become.

PRWeb deals primarily with press releases. In the information economy, press releases have about the same immediate "excitement" factor as nuts and bolts and screws do in manufacturing. They aren't sexy. They are created in their tens of thousands each year by writers who ended up getting sucked into the marketing engine, and they have to carefully walk the line between useful information and advertisement on a daily basis. However, there's something to think about when discussing nuts and bolts and screws and flanges (and press releases). The people who manufacture them are usually very wealthy, because they deliver something that everybody uses on a daily basis, and that every business and organization needs to provide (and thus purchase) on a daily basis. This is a numbers game, a volume game, the only difference being that the commodity being sold are not physical connectors, but virtual ones.

Let me illustrate what I mean by an example. First, I happened to see the announcements of a new podcast magazine (ID3 Podcast, which will be covering the emerging Podcast industry - within the space of a few emails I had managed to secure a column. Then I stumbled across some activist blogging group (with a philosophy somewhat opposed to mine, so you'll excuse me if I don't link it, which I sent off to a couple of activist groups that I do believe in, letting them know what the competition is doing. A couple of conferences that were more or less in my domain also crossed my deck, not to mention several products that I will likely be following up on to do reviews here or in one of my other media venues.

In an industry where information is coming to you fast and furious (and where the visibility of the future is as a consequence surprisingly limited, precisely because there are SO many possibilities to sort through) press releases provide an invaluable tool for cutting out the intermediate chatter of pundits and opinion shapers. Just like a professional stock broker isn't going to rely upon money.com for his or her analyses, neither should a professional information manager rely upon material that is weeks or even months out of date. Thus resources like PRWeb are invaluable.

The fascinating thing about the service however is the fact that it is nearly literally in the middle of farmland. The new corporate offices are located in Ferndale, Washington, a sleepy little town of maybe 10,000 people just south of the US/Canadian border, and consist of a largish former VFW Hall and yoga studio that have been renovated to house the editorial and management offices for a company of perhaps thirty employees. Despite this, PRWeb is no doubt giving companies like Reuters and APIs nightmares, because this very Web 2.0 company uses the jujitsu ability of syndication services as a wedge to reshape the landscape.

As a reporter and periodic application reviewer, I rely fairly heavily upon press releases to both notify me of new tech and to keep track of emerging trends. You have to take most such releases with a grain of salt - they are intended, of course, to provide a favorable review of a given product or service, and the role of a good reporter (or reviewer) is to sift through the actual application in order to find out how closely the hype lives up to the final product. However, most reporters over time tend to develop a pretty good BS detector for sifting through the bias (although they may of course introduce a bias of their own in the process of reviewing).

What changes with companies like PRWeb is the concept of syndication and syndicated filtering. Until relatively recently, most PR companies managed to latch pretty quickly onto the web as a means of publishing news releases on their own site, but the problem of course with this method is that you still needed to get people to come to your site. On the other hand, if you could subscribe to a news feed (either via an email subscription or, increasingly, via a syndication feed) then you can be notified every time something comes in that fits within your general interest domain. In both cases, you are dealing with messaging targeted content to users of the service, the principle difference being the specific nature of the message.

There's some anecdotal evidence that news feeds are beginning to eat into the more traditional domain of email. This is not an unwelcome development; while email has a well established protocol, its structural elements are more than twenty years old, and critical aspects of email, such as the way that content-enclosures are handled, make them rife for abuse (as legions of spammers have found). By moving to something like Atom, you are able to create multiple "entries" within a feed (or even an entry) are able to keep critical metadata in an easy to work with XML format, and are able to handle enclosures of different types in a transparent and consistent manner. Indeed, this seems to be the approach that GMail and other web-mail services are now beginning to employ, offering mail content in both traditional and "news-feed" served vehicles.

Syndication is the key, more than any other element, to the reshaping of the Web. PRWeb looks like it may have found a way to make that syndication into a very significant business model, an should be looked to as an interesting examplar of the new generation.

Kurt Cagle is an author and columnist specializing in XML and web technologies. He lives in Victoria, British Columbia.

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