Articles Index: DisContent
How much time do you spend worrying about your brand? Not your company's brand, yours. If you believe some marketing and new-media gurus, you need to be vigilant about your brand: You've got Kleenex brand tissue, Yardley brand soap, Degree brand deodorant—and Walt Crawford brand writer, editor, and speaker. Right? Wrong. At least it is for me, and I'd like to believe it would be wrong for some of you too.
They're at it again—the doom-criers who assert that reading is disappearing—or at least the right kind of reading. Digital content? Sorry; that's not really reading. In 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) produced "Reading at Risk," a report asserting that reading was declining. The report stated reading itself was at risk and projected that "literary reading as a leisure activity will virtually disappear in half a centuy."
What does every company on the EContent 100 list have in common—other than some connection to econtent, that is?They all have some form of income, either current revenue or backing until they arrive at a sustainable revenue plan or go under. That's true whether they're public or private, for-profit or nonprofit. They must monetize some aspects of what they do.
What's your research and writing worth?
Nothing, apparently … if you agree with Andersonomics as it's interpreted by some folks. Your content has no value if you make it digitally available—unless maybe you're a rockstar or already sponsored.
Should we establish codes of conduct for econtent? Do we need to bring civilization to the wild, wild web? Or, to put it in Old West terms, does this cybertown need a sheriff—or at least some law 'n' order? Whenever you have apparently unfettered freedom, questions like these arise. When that freedom involves an international multimedia platform, the questions are expressed even louder, and they are also harder to answer.
Most bloggers are not journalists in any sense. They don't see their job as reporting the news and shouldn't be held to journalistic standards.
The pundits assure us that some day soon, we’ll always be connected—24x7x52—anywhere on earth. Ubiquitous computing. Full-time interactivity. Always reachable, always connected: We will never be alone again. I don’t regard that future as utopian, except in the dictionary sense of a utopia being “imaginary and indefinitely remote.”
Sorry I didn’t read your blog yesterday. I was busy responding to my many friends on Ning, getting down with my fellow avatars in Second Life, tweeting with my Twitter friends and followers, checking out my friends’ Facebook pages and MySpace profiles, and accepting invitations of colleagues on LinkedIn. Somehow, there wasn’t time to cope with content.
The old paradigms are dead and so is the audience. "Generation C" wants to generate its own content, not consume someone else's.
Two years ago, I considered the “permanent record” we create online when we least expect it. In keeping with the security theme, let’s look at some other unintended consequences of easy econtent creation.
Two years ago, I considered the “permanent record” we create online when we least expect it. In keeping with the security theme, let’s look at some other unintended consequences of easy econtent creation.
At the rate some social networks (and other social software) grow, by the end of the decade everyone in the world will belong. Twice. Ridiculous, I know, but so are some of the numbers and growth rates that get tossed around. The numbers represent something, but maybe not what we’d consider usage in the real world. To a greater or lesser degree, the numbers are haunted by ghosts in the social networks.
Today’s conversational software and collaborative technologies may have an unexpected and welcome side effect: the renascence of the writer. Mindful, literate, cogent, interesting, readable writers are emerging from unexpected sources—and net media helps such writers to emerge.
Ebooks haven’t exactly set the publishing world on its ear. Calling ebook sales “disappointing” is an understatement. For years, ebook proponents touted percentage increases in ebook sales (after all, going from $10,000 to $20,000 is a 100% increase), extrapolating those increases to sales levels of “billions and billions” by the turn of the century, if not sooner.
Let’s take a look at what’s happened to the ebook market players of 2000: it’s not a pretty picture. “Tracking the eBook Vendors” appeared in the August 2001 EContent, following up on 24 “ebook market players” mentioned by Don Hawkins in two 2000 Online articles on ebooks.
Heard about the Read/Write Web? It’s an instant cliché most econtent professionals need to be aware of: the growing importance of user-generated content—and the preference of many users for content coming from other users. I’ve discussed this before (October 2001 and February 2003), back when it was an interesting new trend. Now it’s a phenomenon. I spend more Web time reading “nonprofessional” material than I do reading pro content, and I’m not the only one. It’s a considerable change from traditional media, where the sheer cost of publication and distribution limit most of the field to the pros. I’m not sure it’s the kind of change people expected.
What do you get when you combine a four-year-old licensing system and two possibly complementary projects to digitize substantial quantities of print information? With luck, a substantial ecommons: millions of digital items that can be used directly and as the basis for derivative works without infringing copyright. These projects should also result in full-text indexing for millions more items that won’t be freely available online but can be acquired through libraries and booksellers.
As we wrap up 2005, we should be well on the way to digital nirvana, everyone zooming down the infobahn consuming (and paying for) vast quantities of digital content. We should be getting full measure from our broadband connections—always connected, always in touch, always consuming. Yet somehow potholes keep emerging on that infobahn. In the past few months alone, high-profile columns and incidents have revealed a couple of deep ruts.
Have you ever searched something on Google yielding more than 1,000 results? What a silly question. I’d guess most readers have seen results in the millions. Heck, even a vanity search may yield tens of thousands of results. Here’s a better question: are you sure you’ve ever retrieved more than 1,000 results for a Google search? And who are they to tell you what's relevant?
Arnold Hirshon, executive director of NELINET Inc., a regional library consortium in the Northeast U.S., proposes an “e-content prognostication diamond” consisting of four factors: communications technology, the communications business, econtent development, and the econtent business. He goes further, saying that “higher education and scholarly inquiry sit at the nexus of [these] factors,” and offering a diagram with “higher education” bound by the diamond. That seems odd; surely much of higher education and scholarly inquiry depends on factors other than communications and econtent.
Here’s a thought to give you nightmares: what you say in your econtent is only part of the message people receive. The rest is metacontent—and believe me, you have less control over metacontent than you’d like.
Remember the feeling of liberation when you realized that there was, in fact, no permanent record? That your elementary school GPA and behavior demerits really didn’t matter much in high school, no college would go back to anything prior to high school, and very few employers will even ask for your college transcripts, much less that infamous permanent record? Don’t be too smug, and maybe feel a little sorry for the tech-savvy kids growing up these days. They do have a permanent record of sorts, and so do you. It’s called the Internet.
You’ve seen them—in airports and on airplanes, on commuter trains, in the supermarket, walking down the street, in cars, wandering around outside office buildings. You may even be one. That’s right, the borgs have landed. Millions of them are among us. Maybe they’re not as scary as on Star Trek, but they can be pretty unnerving nonetheless. For the non-Trekkers, “borg” is short for cyborg, a combination of person (or, in Star Trek, any sentient species) and machine. I recently read an article that expands the definition of borg, and now I see them everywhere.
When I see “DRM” I think of digital restrictions management, not digital rights management. Too much DRM serves to restrict the rights of content users in ways I consider unreasonable and inequitable. At its worst, DRM undermines fair use and first sale rights. I recognize the necessity of DRM for some forms of econtent distribution, but DRM doesn’t have to be abusive.
Usability gurus say you have only five or ten seconds to communicate with a Web user before they click on to another site. And with Google now announcing Eight! Billion! Web! Pages! in its index, there’s never a shortage of new sites to click to. So it’s only natural to design content to suit fast-thought users, those for whom reading two hundred words would be serious effort.
Feed me! Feed me!” That’s the cry of many of your visitors, particularly those trying to find nutritional content despite junk-info overload. You can probably help by taking advantage of emerging content delivery options, but be sure to take into account some of the aggravations you may encounter when developing your informational menu.
As I think about what makes econtent different from traditional content and what’s happening in the Internet landscape these days, one topic comes to the fore: trust.
What’s wrong with online surveys? For the insta-polls on so many Web sites, a better question is “What isn’t?” The questions are frequently badly worded, but that’s the least of it.
Making your site look and work just like a well-known category leader also tends to make you look like part of that category when you may not be. You might be better off embracing—and reflecting—your niche.
Does your econtent site play fair with your visitors? Are you keeping the faith—behaving reasonably with each person who visits your site?
Split attention and inattention increasingly limit our ability to communicate, and econtent may encounter even more problems with this lack of attention than traditional forms of communication.
Remember when Amazon first introduced “search in the book” and some people looking for specific books suddenly found the process much more difficult? That was swamping. It was entirely predictable. It also might have been avoidable.
My very first disContent column was about content and context. Three years later, context remains an important topic, ripe for a revisit.
If everybody believes your econtent is the best thing on the Web, people will go to your pages no matter how long it takes or how inconvenient you make it. For the rest, there’s a need for speed.
Life, serious and lighthearted, goes on—and digital content keeps proliferating. Not only can’t we retain everything, maybe we shouldn’t try. What would future researchers do with billions of petabytes of everyday digital content anyway?
What do reference librarians and econtent providers asking for micropayments have in common? They’re both bedeviled by good enough—adequacy as a threat to excellence.
This year, it seems as though the news has become satire—particularly where technology and the Internet are involved.
Millions of Americans have stopped using the Internet. They’re fleeing the Web, avoiding online, dropping dialup, and banning broadband. The Internet? That’s so 20th century!
Right now, I'd like to induldge in a little self promotion. But I hope that talking about my new books (and why you might want to pick up a copy) will help my readers understand what library professionals bring to the econtent forum.
Given the increasing amount of content that is published in only a digital format, what is being done to preserve the digital record from an archive point of view?
It's worth looking at three aspects of bringing site visitors back and making 'em feeling at home: Personalities, personality, and reflexivity.
In case you haven’t heard: I hate two popular Web fonts. Why do I hate Arial/Helvetica so much? The short answer is that I don’t actually have anything particular against them—but I prefer a good serif typeface on screen as well as on paper.
Not every company worth checking out has a Web site that does it justice. This month, I decided to review the current PC Magazine “Top 100” companies’ Web sites using the same criteria as I did with the EContent 100 list in my last column.
For most companies, your Web site is how the world sees you—and the home page may be the most important part of the site. Thus, I thought it might be interesting to do an informal study on the Web sites of companies featured in the EContent 100 issue.
Once you've established that you can churn out worthwhile stuff, you need to stop. Why take a break? One word: freshness.
Content providers might want to rethink boasts of human-free news. But these claims provide a useful reminder: Computers, networks, and other technologies provide tools. It takes people to use those tools for communication and meaning.
I would suggest that the right kind of user-generated content can enrich and augment the best professional content, particularly when it results in a dialogue that adds light rather than heat to a topic, but there are four key elements to encouraging substantive reader dialogues.
I would suggest that the right kind of user-generated content can enrich and augment the best professional content, particularly when it results in a dialogue that adds light rather than heat to a topic, but there are four key elements to encouraging substantive reader dialogues.
"Valuable information has a price." As the year ends, I thought it might be appropriate to offer a few reasons that this assertion is unlikely to come to pass.
When you cope with online content about ebooks, you can believe six impossible things before breakfast, develop a healthy appetite for contradictory messages, or learn to read between the pixels.
Copyright in its constitutional form balances the rights and needs of those who create original works and those who create new works based in part on what came before. But things have gotten out of whack. The resulting problems may not affect some of you directly, but don't bet on it.
What do cruise ships and econtent have in common? Useful lessons for success or failure in a venture that depends on an audience and partners. You're smart people; you can draw your own parallels.
I would argue that Web content sources failed badly on September 11—and that Web content sources succeeded brilliantly on September 11.
The quandary for econtent providers boils down to this: How can an online artifact establish the same relationships as a good magazine?
In fact and in history, the Internet and the Web have never been all about money, just as the nation's economy has never been 100% capitalist.
What follows is a hypothetical letter, but it illustrates a real quandry--not for me or other customers, but for the content'n'convergence megacorporations counting on big monthly fees to pay back their investments.
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