One of my favourite articles of 2004 was a transcript of a speech by Tom Curley, CEO of the Associated Press. In it he said that "...content will be more important than its container in this next phase [of the Web]". Why? Because "killer apps, such as search, RSS and video-capture software such as Tivo -- to name just a few -- have begun to unlock content from any vessel we try to put it in."
Curley's speech was timely for me, because a couple of weeks earlier I'd launched a series of posts on a theory I called Design for Data - which was inspired by a Jason Kottke post and before that a Tim Berners-Lee article. Another inspiration was Joshua Porter's article for Digital Web Magazine entitled How Content Aggregators Change Navigation and Control of Content. All those things, plus my own ideas fermenting in my head! :-)
I wrote about Tom Curley's speech in a November 23 post on Read/Write Web entitled Branding Microcontent. I said then that "RSS flow is creating a need for the data itself to be 'designed', not into HTML containers but into chunks of branded microcontent that will probably be XML."
And that's where I left the theory, until recently when Joshua Porter and I began an email exchange to nut it out some more. At the same time I noticed, via a PressThink post entitled Top Ten Ideas of '04: "Content Will be More Important than its Container", that the journalist blog fraternity is still talking about Curley's speech and its implications.
PressThink is an influential media blog by NYU professor of Journalism, Jay Rosen. He summed up Curley's speech by saying that "we who make news content have to re-locate where we brand it, and think about adding our voice at every step."
Rosen and a number of other media bloggers are looking at Curley's speech from the point of view of news organizations - traditional Content Producers (in 20th century speak). Although I should note that Rosen and others also promote the overlap between news producer and consumer in the 21st century. I'm probably taking a more broader view - where a Content Producer is any person who publishes content on the Web (e.g. bloggers, corporate website publishers). I'm also applying Curley's insights to the Web 2.0 world of web services such as Flickr and Amazon. However despite our different points of view, we're all converging on the same thing - I believe.
Firstly, I liked this observation from Rosen:
"With RSS, readers get my post, the headline, the subhead-- but not the blog environment of PressThink. Therefore the content has to be good enough on its own, without the house. It has to "say" PressThink: no logo, as it were."
I find the "house"/place metaphor to be a fascinating one on the Web. I explored it (in a different context to this) in my Digital Web Magazine article The Evolution of Corporate Web Sites from April 2004. Corporate websites in the 90's were usually designed as 'places', but nowadays they're more likely to be a group of services. For a media website, this may mean for example a news subscription service where the news travels out to users - rather than users traveling to the website 'container' to view it.
Another media person to articulate this well was Tim Porter, in a recent Morph post:
"...the future of news media is the content, whether it be strong, in-depth journalism, witless pap or cogent analysis and conversation. The container, the vehicle that moves that content from producer to consumer (and remember, that distinction now is more and more a semantic one), is completely fungible."
The next piece of insight from Rosen's PressThink was this:
"Publishers and media owners hate spending money on people because deep down they don't believe their business runs on people. (They're wrong, by the way.) They believe they own the news franchise, and the franchise--or brand--is what's valuable."
I think he's making a few points here and one of them is that the value in content is increasingly the personality of the writer - the voice. So the voice becomes the design/brand. Of course that's what blogs are good at - and what traditional corporate websites are not so good at (think of all that horrid corporate-speak and bland design from as recent as a few years ago). At a deeper level, Rosen is saying that content is a truer representation of people - and their influence on business - than the franchise 'containers'.
Lastly, the following quote from Rosen is a nice way to tie-in with the techie crowd (which I belong to):
"'Content will be more important than its container' is thus a disruptive idea in journalism. In a way it is similar to that cross-platform battle-cry in the software biz: write once, run anywhere. (Originated by Sun Microsystems as a slogan for Java.)"
'Write once, run anywhere' is nowadays a basic underlying principle of Web 2.0 (i.e. the Web as Platform). Given that the Internet is the driver of most (if not all) of Tom Curley's insights in his November '04 speech, it's fitting that news media organizations are adopting the same philosophy as Web designers and developers.
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Rosen's comment about re-locating brand struck a chord with me, as I'm trying to figure out how this all affects design.
It may be that designers will basically do the same things they're doing now: mocking up designs in Photoshop/Fireworks, implementing them in some XML format (right now it's XHTML), with the real difference being *where* people interact with and make decisions about those designs.
Posted by: Joshua Porter | January 7, 2005 1:47 AM
One thing to remember about content vs container... it's not really something that will evolve naturally based on need, preference and technology. The technology will be coerced by the stakeholders. In fact, as with anything so tightly joined to financial considerations, we'll see a lot of influence from both the content owners and politics (legal issues especially).
Content owners have not really exerted an influence on issues related to general web content because historically web content has been essentially free, the number of users has been small, ad revenue has been the focus of money making, and those with mainstream audio/video content have been shy to put in on the internet anyway for fear of losing control (except in controlled stores for downloading, of course).
But think about the prime content owners. Music has evolved into tightly controlled DRM'd offerings. Same with ebooks where the owner has content rights. Even the Wall Street journal, Consumer Reports, etc. Wherever it's content that is much desired and there's no free equivalent, they manage to control the method of distribution. Newspapers like NYTimes that don't charge, still insist on those stupid signups where everyone puts bogus information anyway, but probably is the basis for ad revenues somehow to some advertising guru's shame.
What this means to me is that regular web content providers will become much more savvy when choosing technology to publish information. We will end up seeing technology that is a blackbox to the viewers. The presentation will be as controlled as the content is. I don't think controlled content will always be available as html in ways that people can search out the print friendly content and view it in their own favorite form, minus ads and distractions. Content owners will only let you use viewers and formats that protect their ability to control how you see the content. It is how they will be able to get the most of what they provide.
Money making content owners (in general) will focus on income streams, and that means not allowing you to pick and choose how you see the information. That's something they will not give up without a fight once they realize that they have options. Soon the technology will support that. Right now they're stuck, for the most part, with standard web page designs and html and print friendly page offerings etc. And even now you see more page source information where the "guts" of the page is out of site. I think right now we are living in a sweet spot for web users that will turn less friendly and less free in the future. In fact, we may even see more of that micropayment stuff that was predicted in the early days of the internet revolution.
Don't forget... the bottom line is how best to get their hands in your pockets and keep them there. I just hope that all gets balanced by the overwhelming voice of the consumer and the bountiful alternatives offered for free by those outside the commercial influence. We'll see.
Posted by: BobR | January 7, 2005 9:42 AM
Thanks for your comments Joshua and Bob. More food for thought! :-)
Posted by: Richard MacManus | January 7, 2005 9:54 PM
One more thought along the same lines. Remember how a few years ago, everyone was making a big deal about links into site content. They tried really hard to force people to link to the main site so viewers had to navigate in a way they could control.
It didn't work, but mostly because the URL was freely available and people just used it. If web technology better hid those site locations and parameters, etc. I think you would have seen more blackbox web sites by now where you have to enter at their own specified locations. Thank goodness the paradigm is not like that now!
Posted by: BobR | January 8, 2005 8:40 AM