Conservapedia and Liberal niche branding
Just a quick note on something that is worthy of note.
Last week on Lewis Black’s “Back in Black” segment on the The Daily Show, Lewis featured (as only Lewis can) a great example of something we’re sure to see more of as the web evolves. The portal in question is called “Conservapedia“. If the title itself didn’t bash you over the head with its obvious nature, perhaps we should let its, apparently more Liberal predecessor, Wikipedia, explain:
“Conservapedia is a wiki-based encyclopedia project with the stated purpose of creating an encyclopedia written from a socially and economically conservative viewpoint supportive of Conservative Christianity and Young Earth creationism. Andrew Schlafly stated he founded the project because he felt Wikipedia had a liberal, anti-Christian, and anti-American bias.”
For everything from homosexuality to homogenization, Conservapedia serves up your answers with an appropriate side order of conservative bias – the latter example actually directly linking to wikipedia’s own ‘liberal, anti-Christian, and anti-American biased’ definition. The reason I mention this because Conservapedia is my new favourite example of what the future of the net has in store for us.
In a world where the media consumer is often pulling double-duty as the media creator, we can look forward to many more examples of applications built for a mainstream mass audience being re-purposed for the niche crowd. Sites such as Facebook and YouTube of course know this all to well already, but as word about this ideological re-skin spreads, we can certainly expect to find to more of the same from every imaginable interest group.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to register Communistapedia – before it’s too late…
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Andrew Lane is storyteller, a business person, an entrepreneur and an educator focused in the digital content space. Key specialties include the creation, financing and monetization of digital content, branded content and social media. The opinions expressed here are my own and not those of Weber Shandwick.
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