Makes me think of the value of media brands and not the value of the print medium they are delivered on. In the consumer goods arena, companies can license a name with almost no knowledge of the fact to an end consumer. Can publishers begin the process of licensing brands to lend credibility to new arenas? The NY Times front page, available in your home town? Probably a better produced front page than what is made today. Not possible? With digital editing and delivery, it sure is. In fact, news sources could aggregate and charge for the brands and content additions that you want, like cable. My Netvibes feed does this to a degree, but the delivery is still Yahoo homepage 2004.

Why pay, when it is all free? Because no industry survives on free and most stubbornly find a way to get back to normal profits over time. If the telecom industry can do it, anyone can.

I’ve been stewing for a bit on recent deficiencies in the current web information fire hose which just slams down so much information so fast that my trip to a meeting today meant I missed out on “the dialog”. Not real sure I really needed to be tapped into it for any reason other than my inherent need for information (heard that on a TWIT podcast this morning).

As a marketer, I’m feeling that consumer voice screaming in my head with problems that aren’t being solved. There’s Twitter, blogs, RSS and the social network of choice, but it isn’t mine, on my terms, with my voice and on my server with me sending permissions to other people to share and interact with my media on some grander edgeconomy.

I can’t get at a Twitter stream on a good UI (or Facebook for that matter), can’t keep up with the few hundred blogs I want to track and I’d actually like to add more. All these content creators, good thoughtful folks, don’t all use Facebook, they aren’t all close “friends” deserving of being that close to me anyway, but maybe they will be someday. I’m not interested in narrowing my focus on just the A listers as there are so many more thought leaders putting it out there. I also have to slam together my business life with my personal one while maintaining my “voice”.

To top it off, it is 9 PM on Monday evening and Twitter is down.

This is where the next web product development should begin.

Update: Google’s App Engine is interesting, but not when it comes to the rest of us.