Listening to [music on] the radio the other day (Two for Tuesday!), a thought struck me: the way radio was supposed to work, in the pre-payola days, the most popular tunes as requested by listeners got played the most and received the most airtime. Sort of an early version of user-generated content meets social network.
Today, blogs link to the most popular articles and content on the Web. They create a “Top 40” of whatever type of content (the songs) you are looking for.
Is radio sounding like the world’s first social network to you?
Even more interestingly, in the early days radio was also read/write.
Now, we accept the notion that the “radios” most of us own are mere receivers and only the powerful view broadcast – but early radio “was a decentralized technology which allowed amateur broadcasters to present content of interest to themselves and their community” (see “The Silencing of a Democratic Medium” for more).