John Battelle writes in AdAge that marketers, agencies and media execs need to stop fearing disintermediation and start understanding it. "Disintermediation is just another way of saying that you've become irrelevant to your customers. It doesn't mean there isn't a customer, or middlemen of some sort who service that customer, or that the core proposition of your business has disappeared." It just means someone else is doing your job better than you are, he says.

Marketers as well as content businesses are, in essence, in the communication business, and one believes that the need for human beings to communicate is being disintermediated, Battelle writes. Rather: "Where one industry stumbles, another rises up."

So he lays down some new "ground rules for media in a Web-dominated world." And given those new realities, he asks "what role do intermediaries like agencies and publishers play?" He answers, "A very robust one, but the models are shifting."

He concludes: "Just like the VCR opened the film and TV industries to unimaginable new revenue streams, search, RSS and the Internet will do the same for marketers and media companies. If Google, Yahoo, TiVo, and the rest have you feeling irrelevant, don't despair." Instead, "Embrace their new models, and remember what you're good at. Then get on with doing it."