Why is Flicker Gaming awesome? (part 1 of 2)
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[Image: Flicker Logo Header]
](http://www.flickergaming.net)
I do a lot of thinking about what Flicker Gaming is, what we’re trying to do with it, and why it’s so damn cool.
But for all that, I don’t spend much time articulating it. It would probably be good for me to spell out exactly what makes Flicker Gaming worth everyone’s time. Let’s start with the premise.
The media business is changing. If there’s one thing that should be crystal clear to anyone paying attention to the internet, technology, and media, it’s that the old rules of publishing are changing.
The internet has empowered people in ways that no other publishing technology has ever done, and media is more than ever a business of aggregation, not distribution.
RSS is the single most important indicator of this change - news, opinions, update, and commentary all make their way into people’s inboxes and feed readers with relative ease. It used to be that there was a press wire, and certain people had access to the news, and the rest of us, for most practical purposes, couldnââ¬â¢t get at the big pulsing pipeline of everything.
Now, that has changed - big news portals like Google and Yahoo!, coupled with millions of blogs and untold thousands of specialized newsfeeds from sites like the New York Times have put practically everything at the fingertips of the average browser. The problem is that there’s so much stuff to go through on an everyday basis that it doesn’t make a lot of sense for people to slog through it just for the few choice gems. So the average user doesn’t.
And news becomes a business of aggregation. This is why sites like BoingBoing, Slashdot, and Engadget do so well. They collect the most interesting bits of news and content they can find, and they funnel it into a high quality channel.
And yes, channels make sense. I’ve heard several people talk about how, with our increasing tendency to purchase music and shows a-la-cart, channels are going the way of the dinosaur. In some sense, this is true - I certainly like to buy my music in single tracks and I don’t always appreciate how restrictive TV scheduling is.
But while I like to purchase my music by track, I really really enjoy radio. I’ve only recently realized how much I enjoy the convenience of not putting together a playlist myself. It’s convenient to have someone else pick out a song list for you, especially if they’re mostly the type of thing you’d listen to anyway - and that applies to things I read as well.
Blogs are perfect platforms for the future of “channels” because each site is basically a continuous collection of someone’s (or some people’s) favorite picks. Whenever I’m short on inspiration, I tend to go looking around the blogs on my blogroll or the feeds in my reader, because there’s almost always someone whoââ¬â¢s talking about something that interests me.
What Flicker Gaming does is in many ways analogous to programming a gaming “channel.” Anyone can tune in to our RSS feed and keep up, on a daily basis, with the coolest gaming news, opinions, and commentary that we can lay our hands on. It can be seen as a convenience service.
I want to be careful, though, to emphasize that this is not Flicker’s main service. If the fast-growing social networking craze is anything to go by, it seems to be that community matters online. Personally, I think that a sense of community is one of the most important things in driving practically any internet venture.