Interesting post from Brad Stone of the New York Times about traditional retailers and media companies embracing distribution of their content via open APIs (application programming interface). As he says:

…on a mass scale – with every company on the Web now rushing to unlock their content and make an A.P.I. available – even niche sites are set to become professional and satisfyingly comprehensive.

As the Web continues its exponential growth and fragmentation, it makes perfect sense for retailers and media companies to make their content (with brand attribution) broadly available. More exposure equals more opportunity to increase product sales and ad revenue.

We also see significant opportunity for content providers to do more than simply create APIs of their existing content  – or as Jeff Jarvis describes it – “to add value atop the link layer”.  For example, re-imagining and extending content within recipes and restaurant reviews by making it fast and easy for the reader to create shopping lists and reservations.

Interested in learning more?  Contact me (jjaner at springpartners dot com)

Jeff Jarvis had a very interesting post earlier this week about the imperative to align the content economy with the link economy. In short, content producers historically sold their content to generate revenue from those who syndicated it. Today, the link economy works the other way around. When you get traffic, you need to figure out how to benefit from it.

Jeff goes on to suggest that helping the market find the good stuff and providing context and meaning around it are business opportunities. We agree, and also think that there are other, not-so-obvious opportunities. Early efforts around microformats and other semantic approaches are helping to re-imagine content in ways that will provide even more value atop the link economy.