5 ms·
When I open my mouth to talk to my neighbor, I am not producing "content" - I am communicating. The Web is a communication medium. The lack of commercial functi
by liotier 11y ago
When I open my mouth to talk to my neighbor, I am not producing "content" - I am communicating. The Web is a communication medium. The lack of commercial functionality baked in the communication medium is a feature not a bug.
Whoever uses the word "content" betray his bias as a commercial publisher.
- DanielStraight 11y agoWhy can't it be both? Right now, we're communicating, sure. But a book like Eloquent Javascript (http://eloquentjavascript.net/ http://eloquentjavascript.net/) isn't content? The postal system is a communication medium, but you can still buy mail (magazines, for example). I don't see why this is a problem.
- mikeash 11y agoThat seems like a bad analogy. The web wasn't built as a real-time one-to-one communications medium, it was built as a way to publish documents. Later on, enough stuff got added to the system to enable comment forms and chat boxes and whatnot, but the basis of the thing was always document publishing. Take a look at the original web site: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html That's clearly a non-interactive (aside from navigation) one-to-many system. What is that if not "content"?
- JupiterMoon 11y agoDidn't the original browser that was built at the same time as that site include editing tools that would work for any visitor? I.e. making it a many-to-many medium?
- thebaer 11y agoI think the analogy is apt. The medium, unlike a printed newspaper for example, enables communication as much as it enables one-way publishing. And isn't the latter a subset of communication? Think of a personal site. What is that, if not communication about oneself? And once you blog on that site or publish essays [1], the line between a publishing / communication medium heavily blurs. There's nothing inherent about the web that says it must be one thing or the other — it's how people have and continue to use it. There's also a lot to be said about the "fun" of creating things on a global communication platform. Many free tools like YouTube, Instagram, or Twitter are popular because they let the average person utilize the same power of the web we've always had. Some people monetize what they create on those platforms; others use it to communicate; commercial entities create "content" on it; and yet more people use it just for fun. It's all about how you use the medium. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html
- notahacker 11y agoI don't know about the OP, but I'd say many objections to "content" is less to do with it describing a web composed of documents and more to do with it describing a web composed of documents conceived as a means rather than an end. "Content" is to a large extend marketing shorthand for "text which improves our conversion funnel or sells CPM slots by being well optimised for search queries and/or social clicks". Which certainly wasn't the intention of the original web either. Journalists, authors, researchers and people blogging for the joy of blogging generally don't refer to their output as "content", and do think their work is primarily intended to communicate, albeit mostly in one-to-many fashion. Of course regardless of how idealistic their intentions, most journalists have always produced much of their output for publications whose management teams largely consider it as something to wrap ads around, but that approach is far more pervasive and metrics-driven on the modern web.
- mikeash 11y ago"Content" is to a large extend marketing shorthand for "text which improves our conversion funnel or sells CPM slots by being well optimised for search queries and/or social clicks". I guess that's the disconnect. I see that some people use it that way, but to me it's far more broad than that. I would certainly refer to blogs and other such things as "content" too.
- dangoor 11y agoI also find "content" to be a useful shorthand for things like podcasts and videos which can't be lumped in with "writing".
- adiabatty 11y agoMaybe the most widely-agreed-upon definition of "content" is "others' writing and things they publish". Consider NSBlog, a fantastic blog full of interesting and useful information for programming for OS X and iOS. I don't think of my blog as a content source, but I do think of NSBlog as one. I wonder under what conditions mikeash thinks of his blog as "content" — as far as I remember, the only time I think of my blog/website as content is when I'm looking at the whole thing and thinking "Man, there's not much here. I should write more often." However, when I'm writing something that goes on it, I don't think of myself as "producing content", I think of what I'm doing as _writing_. Maybe people call things "content" only when they're sufficiently removed from the specifics of what is being written/filmed/drawn?
- geon 11y ago> The web wasn't built as a real-time one-to-one communications medium Is that a reqirement for "communication"? Email is often non-realtime, many-to-many. No one would claim that disqualifies it from being "communication".
- jacquesm 11y agoGo back a step further and look at project Xanadu. The WWW is basically Xanadu 'light', so without all the royalty and origin tracking, and one way instead of two way links.
- woah 11y agoHave you ever spent any significant amount of time writing something, or making a video, or an image for the web?
- nmrm2 11y agoYes. Most people who used the early web spent huge amounts of time making one or more of these. And posted them. Not just for free, but even on shared hosting plans they paid for. People paid money to share their "content" for free. GOML
- pussinboots 11y ago"get on my level" - for those who dont want to urbandictionary the acronym
- nmrm2 11y agoOh, I meant get off my lawn
- jessaustin 11y agoInteresting, the two meanings aren't really contradictory?
- iolothebard 11y agoNever heard of FOSS & GNU I take it? What a bunch of chumps, right? Linux, what a scam.
- kps 11y agoYes; WorldWideWeb was written in 1989, when commercial ‘content’ on the Internet was approximately zero.
- return0 11y agoAn analogy with printing press would be more apt.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- mudil 11y agoWhen a web publisher produces a content, it constitutes someone's work. It's different than talking to your neighbor.
- fenomas 11y agoThis is a non-argument. When you chat with your neighbor you don't deliver comprehensive lists of browser quirks, carefully researched news stories, wikipedia articles, and so forth. Yet the web has such things, and they are content.