Trumblog

A couple of weeks ago in at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco I ran across a nifty little feature while looking at their exhibit Lens on Life: From Bamako to San Francisco. At the exhibit you can hear the curators comments on the photographs by calling in on your cell phone. Not a cutting edge feature, but nice non-the-less. What put me off was that the commentary had no value. The curator really didn’t have much to add about the photographs. He talked about where the artist was from, the artist’s process, sometimes a little about the photograph itself, but nothing that I couldn’t get from looking at the exhibit itself.

Content is king and the medium has to support that content, not the other way around. And this is just as true for the work that I do online as for my example above. The Center for Media Research’s reports that Content Replaces Communications As Primary Web Use, 49.6% versus 32% for communications, 13.8% for commerce and 4.5% for search. Nielson/Netratings addition of “Total Minutes” and “Total Sessions” to its metrics confirms that. It’s not having online video, it’s having online video that is worth watching. It’s not blogs, it’s blogs worth reading. And people are spending time doing just that.

However, the medium clearly influences what the content is and it’s value. My iGoogle page gives me the ability to collect the prime content that is available and spend the time to enjoy it (though I personally enjoy an RSS reader more). My Twitters force me to tell a story in 140 characters, the restriction resulting in creativity, like a haiku or sonnet (ok maybe more like a bad limerick). Our corporate wiki makes me more precise and structured in what I write there. All examples of functionality that influence content and functionality that is worthless without the content itself. Give me new ways of accessing content, but make sure that there is something there for me that’s worth it.

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...