“In the business of mining, don’t mine sell picks and shovels.”

Chris Brogan shared this at PodCamp3 and it was a theme touched on by several people at PodCamp.

Here’s what it breaks down to… In the ever-expanding internet world there is an over-abundance of UGC (User Generated Content). People are starting blogs, twittering, posting, commenting and generally just being über-content-producing machines. However…

The money to be made on the internet is NOT in joining this expanding group of people. Instead, it is serving them.

Unless you are a charismatic expert in something or are serving a niche, you are going to have a heck of a time trying to make a living on an ad-driven blog.

You can try and blog for money or be the next TechCrunch like 20,000 other  unimaginative bloggers. Or… You can find ways to serve them and help them in the content creation rat race.

Who are the people helping to make content generation easier?

WordPress, LiveWriter, Flickr, YouTube, sites that help us in content generation.

Who are the people helping make sense of content generation?

Technorati, MyBlogLog, Friendfeed, and anything that aggregates or ranks content

Who are the people helping disseminate content?

Twitter, Google Reader, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, and all other ways to share.

So tell me… How can we serve content generators better? Where is the pain? What makes content generator’s lives easier?

I’m not sure, I’m interested in what you think, let me know in the comments.

Thanks for reading. Content Generation… Sell Picks and Shovels. is a post from Blake Imeson