MediaFlect

The old new way of looking at a Web site used to be that the homepage wasn’t king, that every page was now the homepage. Meaning, with Google and Yahoo and a lot of other ways to get someone to look at your content on your site, you had to be mindful that someone could come in on any page, and every page had to have the things you wanted folks to see – and navigate to. Maybe top stories, or “best-of” or the latest Special Report or e-commerce applications. Whatever.

Now, a newer way of looking at the world is that folks will be viewing your content without even having to come to your site. Syndication technologies, most notably RSS –which sends some chunk of your material out to whoever takes the feed – mean folks essentially scrape a portion of your site into their reader and may or may not click back in. The good news is that you get your stuff in front of them. The difficult part for traditional media operators to swallow is that your content could appear in any number of configurations next to any mix of content over which you have no control.

Try to control it, and in the long run you’ll probably lose. Very little content is so compelling time after time that folks will go through hassle to get it over something else that’s easier. Or they’ll find a way to get it the way they want, anyway (witness TiVO).

And now, the syndication model is, it seems, moving to video, as well. A sizeable chunk of seed money is going for a new video venture called Brightcove, with a lot of big names like Jeremy Allaire and Barry Diller involved. Brightcove plans to let people – most likely independents rather than Hollywood types — syndicate their content to the many minions, supported by advertising.

This is a little different than JD Lasica’s Ourmedia http://ourmedia.org/ , which is providing hosting space in a non-profit forum for people to place their videos online. Maybe there’s room for both models.