Dis-intermediate This

Yes, it's true, I don't post often.  You can't expect to see much here, particularly with the new blog.digg.com refresh.  I'm considering just redirecting there, but I figure I'll leave this up a wee bit more and if enough people ask me to keep this here I'll let it stay.

I'm being asked a lot about what I mean by dis-intermediation.   Essentially, the idea is that a monopoly of some kind, whether it exists because of tradition, inertia, or simple corruption, forces a supply chain in such a way that it can't be bypassed.  For example, in the past, you always had to pay a small subset of telecommunications carriers to host a website (1995-1998), or at least for the T1 or whatever the pipe was to feed it, and thus those few carriers collected a dime on every website launched.  However, if you allow the content to sit next to the various networks, bypassing the local loops, you dis-intermediate the supply chain that used to exist.  You are not closing the telecom companies out of the competition, you just force them to literally compete for hosting.  It has economic impacts, of course, and pricing tends to fall and quality tends to climb.

With media, the same principle applies... To create a truly level playing field, allow any media object to access equal size markets as a publisher who controls a distribution platform.  You don't need to have a printing press any longer, or a large publishing network, to get the same idea or media object to millions of people (like blogs, videos, news articles...).  Digg tries to do this, like Equinix did for telecom and Internet infrastructure.

Equinix was a physical solution, which required billions to be spent on relocating networks into physical buildings scattered around the globe.  Digg leverages that infrastructure (Internet) to accomplish this virtually.