Appointment Surfing

Your Uncle Grambo wants to take you back. WAAAAY back. Back to the days before terms like DVR and VOD liberated television audiences from the shackles forced upon them by network programming executives. Back when those interested in being active participants in the pop culture discourse had to make sure their arses were planted firmly on their couches in order to catch that evening's hot teevee shows. Back then, media mavens had a specific term for programs that resonated so strongly with audiences that they would cancel all of their other plans in order to be at home in front of the tube when the show aired. That term was called "appointment viewing."

Now pardon me if I'm getting into Jeff Jarvis territory here, but yesterday your Uncle Grambo was struck with a thought. While the concept of "appointment viewing" may be on the outs in the medium of television, if you tweak this basic premise ever-so-slightly, you could revolutionize the way that people interact with The Blogosphere™. I call it APPOINTMENT SURFING™.

Here's what I'm thinking. While very few people outside of the nerdiest of nerds understand what RSS is and how it can be leveraged to make web surfing more efficient, EVERYONE understands the basic idea of tuning into a television or radio station at a specific time in order to experience a specific piece of content. Using the seldom referenced transitive property, if forward-thinking individuals in The Blogosphere™ were began both 1) promoting and 2) delivering features at a given time each and every day, you could begin to develop a schedule where WAVES of traffic "tuned in" to your blog to get information that they're looking for. Focus for a second on blogs that feature 12 or more blog posts a day; some of these posts are based on breaking news and others of which are based around standard features. Using Gawker as an example, you can easily envision a schedule like this: "Gossip Roundup" goes up at 10am, "Media Bubble" at noon, "Blogorrhea" at 2pm, and "Remainders" at 4pm.

You can see where I’m going with this. Over time, assuming the content merited it, web surfers would begin to develop behavior patterns inline with these schedules. And as anyone who has ever taken a marketing class could attest, behavior patterns of desirable individuals that are tied to fixed schedules can easily be sold. Hell, that idea is at the very core of the business model of network television! If enterprising blog maestros come to realize this, that's when the money will start rolling in (If I may paraphrase Che in "Evita"). And yes, you read that correctly, I just referenced "Evita" in a mini-treatise about digital media. Weird!

So yeah, I admit it. This is hardly a revolutionary concept. That said, this may just be one of those ideas that is just so god damn obvious that no one ever thought to label it this way before. A cursory search of the term "appointment surfing™" on Google reveals that no one has really ever used this specific terminology in this capacity before. So I guess that makes your Uncle Grambo a pioneer of sorts. Which can only mean one thing ... I got one up on Jeff Jarvis!

Appointment surfing™. Remember, you heard it here first.