A Plea: Don't Overthrow King Content

[jmiller]

This article inadvertently turned into a Net Neutrality article, as the implications became clear to me. It began with a reaction to a Bear Sterns presentation, focusing less on content and more on aggregation and context, whereby a cable-like Internet would be created.

But I feel if that becomes the focus for the 21st Century, then we'll end up with an Internet much like the world of cable, where content is selected and presented and controlled, leaving us with fewer choices than more of them.

My dense article here.

[Dcrux]

You're kidding ...right? Content died a long time ago. It's almost impossible to get on-topic posts in the content discussion forum.

And these are not executives we're talking about. About every third post here asks about "the best CMS" with not so much as a hint of content strategy. It could be called information, or quality writing. It's not. For every 200 discussions of which CMS there is perhaps one about actually creating quality content.

Check out this nice article arguing about scraped content. This is hardly atypical. Content is what fillss a layout container. And the time spent on the layout versus writing anything substantive is evidence.

In The rebooter’s children go rebootless Zeldman notes

Maybe redesigning for the sake of redesigning is not enough: to communicate visually one must first have something to communicate about. ...Rarely could you identify an idea or purpose behind the site, or name a possible user goal the site was intended to facilitate. There was no flow, no legibility, no usability. It wasn’t so much that the designers had contempt for their users as that they seemed never to have been taught to think about users at all.

Is this very far from the most mindlessly superficial best of network TV? Have you ever landed on a site SEo'd within an inch of its life? Ever find a site with stock photography cliches?

People build layouts and fill them. They fill the conteainer with generic, trite, boring content. The very term content suggests no less. Content was designed to be an excuse for technology. For more sites than would care to admit it, content is what's keeping the keywords from running together.

Content would be that kingdom the vast majority are too embarrassed to admit they can't find on a map. In practice, content is merely a figurehead king, without power or authority. Not much different than make believe "reality TV."