Sérgio Santos

Founder and developer at Bloco.
Technician at Rádio Baixa. Host of Posto.
Member of Coimbr'a Pedal.

Bundlr wasn’t intended to be a journalism tool but journalists can take advantage of its features for their everyday work. Besides gathering different social media and online contents like photos, videos and tweets to present in a single page, it can be used privately for research and brainstorming to write articles.

— New curation tool Bundlr sets sights on ‘untangling the web’

Tags: bundlr, journalism

Where's The Middleman? - Content Intermediaries On Web2.0

This post was originally written in September 2007.

A post about content providers and intermediaries at innovation playground got me wandering about what role can intermediaries have on the web?

In offline media, content providers can’t, by themselves, contact directly with consumers on a regular basis. Intermediaries provide the ability to make distribution possible for a wide audience, using means not available for everyone. It’s like farmers having to sell they’re goods to larger distribution companies. However, the Internet releases the physical restrains. As soon as publishing tools became available and easy-to-use content providers start creating their own platforms and talking directly to network users. And suddenly intermediaries seemed superfluous.

Aggregation and filtering

But old models started appearing in new formats. One that became very popular, special among blogs is aggregation. The best way to achieve broader audiences is still through diversity and so, all kinds of aggregators start appearing, grouping different minds and opinions under a specific subject. From blog planets, to type specific aggregators (reviews-only websites like LouderVoice for example), there are many ways to increase the value of the creators individualism.

Filtering also became a common practice, although not the kind we usually see on mainstream media. No content is being censured or controlled online, it’s simply filtered by external platforms. More sources also means more noise and users have came up with several solutions. The most popular nowadays use either crowdsourcing filtering like Digg and Del.icio.us or editorial filtering like Slashdot. These often reach mass audiences, although usually with narrow visions and in detriment of niches and less generic content. There can also be found filters of sources and not content, specially from older media in new platforms like newspaper blogs (New York Times Blogs for example).

Intermediaries influence on content providers and consumers

While the middlemen have always be seen in a negative way, for being responsible of dictating the sources and the content available, sometimes for profit and others due physical restrains, it’s role on the web as gained a new meaning. They’ll eventually give up the control and start embracing distribution only models. They can no longer determine what we’re going to consume, only the way their going to present it to us. And if we don’t like it, we have choice, much more choice.

Content providers no longer have to give away their minds for visibility and can now embrace all kinds of content distribution. Value will only be decided between the creators and their audiences and users can now choose who they will give their attention to. This is the path for an Attention Economy where consumers have the last word on the production and content providers only have to listen to them.

Tags: media

Blog archaeology

Since I’m taking my old blog down, I decided to do a bit of blog archaeology and choose three posts to publish here. They bring up many memories from as far as 2007. Some of the posts I gone through I don’t even remember writing. Hope you like the ones I picked.

Tags: blogs

Seed Capital invests in Bundlr

Good news: we’re being funded by Seed Capital. After Kickstart 2H10, we kept in touch with Mário Valente and finally last week we signed the papers. We’re very happy to count with a great team of advisors and join the growing group of companies also funded by Seed Capital:

This deal will help us keep focus on building Bundlr. Meanwhile, the first public version is almost finished. It will be invite-only, so if you want to try it before everyone else, drop your email at gobundlr.com.

Tags: bundlr, startups

PechaKucha Night Coimbra #01

Last Saturday I went to the first edition of PechaKucha Night in Coimbra. I really liked it, even with the wide range of themes and performances.


The folks at xDA have a good detailed report on the event:

For those who don’t know what pechakucha is, well, then you should check their website: it’s an international event, started in Japan, mostly aimed for architects, designers and photographers to show their work in a fixed presentation format of 20 images x 20 seconds. The event started becoming a success in Japan and has been adopted worldwide. Coimbra had their first edition last night at D.Dinis. Despite two last minute withdrawals the house was quite packed and people seemed to enjoy it, so i reckon it was a success.

Tags: coimbra, events