Long in the works, my O’Reil­ly Media-pub­lished “Web 2.0 Mashups and Niche Aggre­ga­tors” is avail­able. The title could sort of be boiled down to “hey this Quak​erQuak​er​.org thing has become kind of neat” but it’s more than that. I wax lyri­cal about the dif­fer­ent kind of aggre­ga­tor com­mu­ni­ty sites and I throw a new tongue-twister into the social media are­na: “folk­so­nom­ic den­si­ty” (Google it now kids and you’ll see the only ref­er­ences are mine; a few years from now you can say you knew the guy who coined the phrase that set the tech­nos­phere on fire and launched Web 3.0 and ush­ered in the sec­ond phase of the Age of Aquar­ius, yada yada).

A hun­dred thank you’s to my fine and patient edi­tor S. (don’t know if you want to be out­ed here). I’ve been an edi­tor myself in one capac­i­ty or anoth­er for fif­teen years (I’ve some­times even been paid for it) so it was edu­ca­tion­al to expe­ri­ence the rela­tion­ship from the oth­er side. I wrote this while liv­ing an insane sched­ule and it’s amaz­ing I found any time at get all this down. 

As luck would have it I’ve just got­ten my design site at Mar​tinKel​ley​.com up and run­ning ful­ly again, so I hope to do some posts relat­ed to the PDF in the weeks to come. In the mean­time, below is the mar­ket­ing copy for Web 2.0 Mashups and Niche Aggre­ga­tors. It is avail­able for $9.99 from the O’Reil­ly web­site.

Web aggre­ga­tors select and present con­tent culled from multiple
sources, play­ing an impor­tant taste-making and pro­mo­tion­al role. Larger
aggre­ga­tors are start­ing to com­pete with main­stream news sources but a
new class of niche and do-it-yourself aggre­ga­tors are orga­niz­ing around
spe­cif­ic inter­ests. Niche aggre­ga­tors har­ness the pow­er of the internet
to build com­mu­ni­ties pre­vi­ous­ly sep­a­rat­ed by geog­ra­phy or institutional
iner­tia. These micro-communities serve a trend-setting role.
Under­stand­ing their oper­a­tion is crit­i­cal for those want­i­ng to
under­stand or pre­dict cul­tur­al change and for those who want to harness
the pow­er of the long tail by cater­ing to niches.