Over the last few weeks, I’ve been seeing a lot of smart people experiencing small paroxysms of insecurity about the use of the word “content” to describe the stuff that people publish online. “It’s impersonal,” goes the narrative. “It’s a buzzword.” “It takes all the humanity and warmth out of our stories and insights and […]
Yesterday, I wrote that content is expensive, and that there are really only four ways to subsidize content online: ads, subscriptions, marketing writeoffs, and paid delivery channels. But we’re not really publishers over here in the web content world, so we don’t need to think about this stuff, right? Eh. If you work in web […]
One of the ideas that kept pecking at my brain while I was prepping for our SXSW publishing panel was this: Content isn’t free. If it’s good, it’s very expensive to make. We can subsidize its production and maintenance in any number of ways, but we have to start being honest—with ourselves, our clients, and […]
Visual communication is one of the least frequently explored areas within the content world, possibly because it’s so easy to lump in with UI design, aka Not Our Problem. But many forms of visual communication clearly are content, part of the muscle of a website or other project. In the hands of a skillful communicator, […]
In a couple of weeks, I’m going to be on a panel called “New Publishing and Web Content” at SXSW Interactive, and I’ve been thinking even more than usual about publishing and the anxieties surrounding its supposed demise. When people talk about the imminent death of publishing, they’re usually talking about something narrow, specific, and […]