A 10-year march to a cusp

The Associated Press recently asked me to comment on the 10th anniversary of the Home & Garden Television Network, a former joint business partner. That got me thinking about changes to the category of home living lifestyle media over this decade. Back then we just had the magazines, like BH&G, and skimpy newspaper coverage. Now, top-rated primetime network shows cover home makeovers.

Does this mean that our premise of trouble ahead for traditional media doesn't stand up to scrutiny when examining an explosion of media in a category like this? Our answer: We don't know. But look at news this week about Google's development of video search, and think of the great cache of content from HGTV's first decade. If we're on the cusp of gaining the ability to find the exact 60 seconds of HGTV video on wallpapering in a corner for a project we're doing that night, what does this mean to the couch potato mass audience? Will we abandon the network and miss the commercials to just scurry around and do stuff from searchable snippets?



While on the topic of HGTV, we popped into the ever-expanding Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia now with 340,000 audience-contributed articles. Wiki is all set up for its audience to write articles about HGTV's shows.