The Big Scary Idea : Meh...

The Brainchild of Jason Stoddard, Adam Rakunas, Rina Slayter and Ken Brady, The Big Scary Idea is a business plan containing a lot of business-speak and marketing buzz words but it ultimately boils down to the following ideas :

1. Genre stuff is really popular online
2. Genre content is spread out across thousands of sites
3. Centralised content generates more page views and therefore more revenue.
4. Let's try and centralise online genre content on one huge website

It's an interesting idea and I can certainly see the attraction of a Digg-style site that opens up interesting blog posts and stories to wider audiences but my problem with the BSI is that it runs contrary to the sociology of genre.

Firstly, If you look at existing online communities related to genre, you'll see that by and large people don't cluster for literary style, they cluster for writer.  As a result, Scalzi and Gaiman's blogs get more hits together than anything else in the SFnal blogosphere and Jordan, Martin and Hamilton's communities piss from a great height upon the more generic genre website that cover Jordan, Martin and Hamilton and other writers too.  This tends to be because these fan communities also have sections devoted to other readers so while you may mostly be interested in talking about volume 57 of the Wheel of Time, you can also talk about interesting books on the same website with people you "know" from your Robert Jordan-related discussions.

Secondly, genre fragments culturally.  Literary SF tends naturally to clump itself into smaller and smaller movements and sub-genres.  This is true when it comes to writers of books, but it is also true of consumers of books who frequently clump in accordance with very specific tastes and relations to text.  For example, as a critic, I have more online contact with other critics than I do with people who share my tastes in SF, even if the critics have tastes and backgrounds wildly diverging from mine.

The problem is that while "being interested in genre media" is a big enough tent to doubtless support a profitable online venture, it's also a big enough tent that there are other smaller habitations inside the tent and people in those little huts don't necessarily all like each other or share the same interests.