At Gnomedex, Gregg Spiridellis, the “Jib” in JibJab talked about how JibJab has evolved from a low volume, high risk content creation company, to a platform that enables the long tail of content creation and distribution. They recently launched Starring You, which allows users to create their own content on top of storylines/shorts created by JibJab. By focusing on providing humorous content and then allowing users to distribute it via mediums such as MySpace, Facebook, etc (they have signed up with Clearspring for widget creation). The service should be a hit based on the brief demo that he showed and a quick preview of the site.

Some of the points made my Gregg were very poignant. The web today provides an excellent medium for distributing content. While creating content is getting a lot easier, it does not necessarily translate into good content. There are a lot of creative people, like the folks at JibJab, who can create the storylines and animations, which can then be leveraged by others. It is a model that has not been used often enough, where content creators use the public as a distribution network. One can think of a few other avenues, e.g. Elan Lee’s Edoc project is another example for creative people to use different media to distribute their content, in this case, little mysteries hidden in clothes.