Eyeball Debate

The talk of the blogverse this week was Eyeballs. Om wrote about it in Business 2.0 magazine this month. With the acquisition of some many users websites "from Dow Jones's $519 million acquisition of MarketWatch a year ago to America Online's recent purchase of Weblogs Inc. for a reported $25 million -- signal that Internet content is hot again." Well, I have been saying content is king for a while, especially local content. With the shrinking public access channels as well as the advent of digital camcorders, getting content is easy. From soccer games to school plays to local government meetings, it is easy to record and easy to stream or upload. And why wouldn't you want to? It gives people a reason to belong to your community ISP. Web advertising is growing. Take advantage! Who would do the recording? Parents and siblings of kids in the play. High school or college A/V squads. Why? Yahoo 360. Google Base. Flickr. MySpaces.com which is owned by News Corp, the owner of Fox and DirecTV. The portals along with some start-ups are working on file storage and digital music lockers for consumers. If you are going to be a Residential ISP, you have to start offering more than connectivity. And emotions (like pride in your son's soccer game or interest in local government) might be worth a few dollars more than the ILEC.