Bob Garfield on the new marketing model

Bob Garfield, writing on the Advertising Age site, tells us that over the next 18 months he is going to be writing a book online. (Link from Publishers Lunch.) This, he says, will be no wiki: 'I'm the sole author. And it will be owned lock, stock and hypertext by my employer, Crain Communications. But who cares? It's being produced in full public view for public view.'

Here are the outlines of a couple of chapters which suggest to me that the book will be essential reading for those who feel that the old publishing model is sick unto death and is going to be replaced by some disintermediated new thing:

1) Say it Ain't So, Status Quo: The context for epochal changes is a complete breakdown in the media-marketing model and the ascendance of the internet. All of this explained.

12) Aggregation Nation. It has always seemed like a chicken-and-egg proposition. When the mass-media model collapses, where will the content come from? Who will pay to create programming without the guaranteed payoff from ad-supported media? Answer: clever aggregators will gather meta data from the online universe and serve up what the public finds most engaging.