Appealing to ethnic niches
Rohit Bhargava profiles the new global cinema service Jaman. He makes an interesting observation about the most successful ethnically-focused web services, which tend to be dating or social networking sites:
The problem with [appealing to an ethnic niche] is that most of these sites are not inviting others outside a particular ethnicity to interact and learn about a culture.
Jaman, on the other hand, is focused on bringing a portion of the world’s cultural artifacts (in this case, movies) to the world, thereby encouraging cultures to explore each other. This is yet another example of a bogie — providing a common denominator (in this case, a medium: cinema) — to help explore the differences and similarities between cultures. I find it particularly interesting that for a service that is focused on cross-cultural exploration, Jaman’s site is presented exclusively in English, and seems to target the US market initially. (I imagine this will start to change once the service leaves beta.)
Posted on February 23, 2007
Filed Under Culture |
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