Robert Young, a guest columnist at GigaOM blog wrote on April 4th what I thought to be a very insightful discussion on how URLs are the power behind the shift of power between corporate controlled media/content and user-created content.

In this piece, Young says that if we “to look at the web as a vast collection of URLs” we see that the vast majority of new URLs are created by consumers…Young adds:

“As we all know, the URL is a powerful and extensible concept… it represents the most fundamental element of the web and it continues to grow in breadth and depth of its utility. After all, URLs enabled eBay and Amazon to create virtual storefronts. If you put a major destination site like Yahoo! behind an x-ray machine, the skeleton that you’ll see is a vast collection of proprietary URLs that contain all sorts of media. Google used URLs as way to poll collective wisdom in its effort to determine high relevancy for its search results. Without doubt, in the world of new media, URLs are a source of power, control, influence, and dollars.”

Young goes on to note that linking URLs create social networks, and that since more URLs are being created by consumers, that these powerful networks are also user-driven.

So what does this mean for business research? As more users create social networks that gather around URLs, these may serve as new niche sources of expertise—say a community that follows a smaller private company, or a tiny industry, or product. Niche communities exist already to some degree, as predicted by Chris Andersen in his seminal piece, The Long Tail, the real action on the Net is in the niches, and users, not major publishers or information vendors are increasingly going to be the creator of these niches.

These user created communities take various forms too—see, for instance, today’s New York Times piece about Squidoo, online marketer guru Seth Godin’s Beta site that offers what it calls “lenses” where individual consumers offer advice and expertise on thousands of niche topics from Dale Earnhardt Jr and Africa to Soy Protein and Vieques, PR.

There’s also “Adventures in Market Research” and lots of business oriented lenses on Squidoo too. While most of these lenses are primarily pointers to other sites, again, they generate their own unique URL, and can eventually create communities that form around the particular niche lens.

Technorati Tags: Social Networks

Technorati Tags: Squidoo