Seth Godin wrote recently about the plight of agents. Literary agents, travel agents, stock brokers, real estate agents — all either extinct or becoming so. Why? Anonymity:

The problem with being a helpful, efficient but largely anonymous middleman is pretty obvious. Someone can come along who is cheaper, faster and more efficient. And that someone might be the customer aided by a computer. . . .

Middlemen add value when they bring taste or judgment or trust to bear on a transaction that isn’t transparent. . . . Key point: anonymous agents are interchangeable and virtually worthless. Agents that don’t do anything but help one side find the other side in a human approximation of Google aren’t so helpful any more.

Does that mean the business of being an agent is dead? No! It means it’s time to make sure you’re not anonymous. Add value that can’t be added otherwise — and that is where discernment comes in. Agents can provide a powerful filtering (or editing) function.

But, in order to provide this function, agents need to say “no,” perhaps as often or more than they say “yes.” This means they need to brand their own identity as someone who is a helpful nexus of good content, be that content a steady stream of well-priced homes, a stable of awesome authors, or a collection of well-performing startups.

This may mean there is room for fewer agents in the world, but it also means that the ones who are left can play a more important role.