December 15, 2009

• The Four Components of Content and the nature of Blogging

  The other day I asked the question “What exactly IS blogging?” in order to try and understand the plight of Xanga and the future of online content distribution platforms. Today I continue that discussion with my own thoughts on the general nature of the internet and content creation and where blogging fits in that greater discussion.

  Whenever we try to create some new platform of content distribution there are four major principles or components that we need to understand and take into account when trying to decide how our content is going to work and who we are going to market it to.  They are: Presentation, Interactivity, Cooperation, and Openness (PICO).  Each of these is a continuum. You can have very little of it or you can have a lot of it and there are advantages to doing things either way. But how you handle each of these four components will determine who your content platform will appeal to and hence what kind of audience you will attract. 

  The importance in understanding this is that it gives us strong insight both into the kinds of platforms we might want to aim to create and into the platforms that already exist. Are they focused on High levels of Interactivity or are they focused on being as Closed (minimal Openness) as possible?  We can also I think understand how certain platforms have failed in the past. If you build a platform devoted to high levels of Openness for example and then later on Close the system down by creating numerous new “privacy” features that limit who can view the content users generate, it should be no surprise that the platform loses users in droves. It’s not that a Closed system is not in itself possible, rather it’s that people came to your system wanting Openness and when you closed the system down you alienated those users.  Similar lessons can be learned from other characteristic shifts.

  Let’s take a look at each of the four pillars in turn. 

  Openness

  Let’s start with what it means to be Open. Basically the openness scale is a scale of intended access. It runs form completely private to completely public content. Unshared content in your own mind is minimally open. Only you have access to it and nobody else can ever gain access to it (given current levels of technology anyway).  Nor do you INTEND for anyone to be able to access that content. It’s closed to others. They couldn’t even stumble across that content. Access is simply barred to them.  On the other hand a book that is in the public domain, present in every library, and available on numerous public websites is highly Open content. Most people both have the power to access it and are likely to access it.

  Interactivity

  If a content platform is highly interactive it means that external users who have access to the content not only consume the content but generate content as well. Indeed they generate a specific kind of content that is in reaction to other content on the platform. In other words they communicate with one another and those communications are THEMSELVES content. A conversation between two people is a form of interactive content. A poster is an example of non-interactive content.

  Cooperation

  Cooperation differs from interactivity in that the content generated is not reactive to one another but SHARED amongst participants. It’s a question about how the content is created.  Consider a conversation between two people. It’s interactive, but each person is coming up with what to say on their own. Their content is created only by one person. There’s no cooperation involved in its genesis. However, now imagine a group of people get together and each adds a picture to create a collage which they then put up on a wall as a poster. That’s a more cooperative content creation system.  In other words cooperation is a measure how much the entities who have access (see openness) to content are allowed to alter, edit, enhance, or change it.

  Presentation

  Lastly there’s Presentation. Presentation is the trickiest to understand so I left it for all. The presentation of content is a measure of how much it is intended to be viewed by others. Highly presentational content is generated with a desire that other people consume it.  Presentation as a practical matter tends to have to do with how much customization capability a system allows the content generators. That is, if a system only allows you to present plain blocks of text, no matter how hard you try you can’t make your content very presentational. However, it’s important to understand there are no absolutes about presentability. Something that doesn’t LOOK very presentable or palatable to you doesn’t mean it was not designed with the intent that it be presented to people. It just means that it is likely that you are not amongst the target audience. 

  ———————

  Now that we’ve established the four categories let’s run through some content examples and establish where they are on the four scales.

  Pre-Internet World Examples:

  A physical diary: If written to yourself by yourself that you neither allow nor intend anyone to ever read it, then this the epitome of low all four categories.

  A letter: This is more open than a diary but still not very public. You intended one person to view your content. So it’s a little presentational. If a letter was sent to a big company or a large institution though it’s both more public and more presentational. If a letter exchange ensues then there is a small amount of interactivity involved.

  A casual conversation between a group of friends: Like a letter, this is not very open. Generally there’s little that is presentational about it. But there’s a lot of rapid interaction, though generally not a lot of cooperation unless the speakers are working together to expand understanding of an idea.

  A book, A Song, A Poster:  Each written or created by one person but distributed or sold publicly. These are all highly Presentational, Highly Public content. Many people have access to them and they are intended to be seen by many people. But nobody can

  A newspaper: A slightly more cooperative content system that is still highly presentational and public. Also through letters to the editor and the likes it’s even a little bit interactive.

  A television show, a movie, or an album or band performance: Like a newspaper these are more (but still not very) cooperative and very public very presentational content but they are not at all interactive. 

  Transition to a new World

  For the most part those examples above describe the limits of the pre-internet Read Only world. That era was dominated primarily by striving to reach new heights of openness and presentation. A little cooperation in the form of group endeavors was added, but never was it open to the greater public to really cooperate or interact in the generation of content. Closed groups of entities, like a business, or a college could cooperate and interact internally but the greater audience of the work was exposed to the content without the capacity to interact or cooperate.  We only started to see systems that have really high levels of cooperation and interaction in public content with the advent of the internet.

  Also with the advent of the internet, Presentation changed. In the prior era content was generated with the aim to present to the average consumer.  The idea was to get as MANY people to view the content as possible. As a result content tended be presented with pretty universal concepts but niche ideals could not be or were not catered to.Thus presentational characteristics were decided from the top down to be appealing to the target audiences. With network television if you only have five or six channels you obviously can’t create content that appeals to everyone, rather you can only try to present content desirable by MOST people.  With Cable Television obviously your content platform can present content to many MORE people with varied interests. But with the internet, Presentation ability exploded. An internet communication platform can provide the tools whereby anyone can present content for ANYONE if they so choose provided the platform provided them with the tools to cater their content to their intended audience.

  Post-Internet Examples

  It’s interesting to note that in the beginning of the internet we modeled most of our systems on Read-Only world examples so as a result they didn’t take much advantage to the new capabilities in making cooperative and interactive content. As time has passed and the internet has advanced we’ve seen systems become increasingly more interactive and cooperative.

  A Static Website made by someone solely for themself:  These are highly public. Anyone can vew a website who has access to the internet and all sites are spidered and can be linked to. However, many home pages are not very presentational. The creator did not intend for others to view them outside of the few friends they told about it. If you have no forum or contact information it’s not interactive and it’s never cooperative.

  A commercial or organizational or otherwise public Static website:  These are low interaction highly public and highly presentational content. The goal of the company/group/person is basically to use the web to broadcast its content in much the same way it did its television shows. If users can buy stuff on the site, post comments, or offer reviews, it’ssomewhat more interactive but again these sites rarely have anything cooperative.

  Emails: Emails are exactly like physical letters except the nature of the internet sort of MAKES them more interactive. You don’t have the delayed response which discourages interaction that takes place in physical letters. With emails response CAN be immediate. So they are highly interactive.  However, like normal letters they are NOT very public. The intended audience is the limited pool of entities who are on the receiver list.  Nobody can just stumble upon your emails (*normally*). 

  Old School Diary Sites:  the precursor to blogs these were literally diaries online. Most of the systems didn’t have access control and didn’t have the ability to leave comments and were pretty bare bones in terms of customization features. In effect they were highly open, very low presentation, low interactivity, low cooperation systems. Yet the platform as a whole was a bit cooperative, since users together were creating an area with pooled contnet where people could go to read each other’s personal chronological experiences. You couldn’t interact, but you could follow and that had an enormous new kind of appeal to it.

  Forums/Newsgroups: These are the first real system that really takes advantage of the new capabilities of the internet. Forums and newsgroups were highly open and ENORMOUSLY interactive content systems.  People replied to posts and those replies became the CORE of the content and the appeal of the system. Originally forums did not have very many cooperation features nor customization features to allow people to tailor their content more to specific audiences outside of being able to post under specific topics. But again from the perspective of the overall forum the users are cooperatively creating a pool of debate content.

  Chat Programs/ Instant Messaging:  Much like forums these are HIGHLY interactive systems however, unlike forums these are intentionally CLOSED. Only the people who are invited into the chat can join the discussion. Here though there is nothing even remotely presentational about the content or cooperative. Conversations, generally are simply lost after they occur so no pool of knowledge is created.

  Blogs:  Modern blogs are highly interactive (though generally not as much as forums) and highly open but generally are MUCH more Presentational than Forums. Users on blogs create their content on a personal “site” which they present to their intended audience. Often they can customize that site to fit their own tastes or that of their intended audience. In effect they are communities of linked public websiteswith forums attached. Most blogs don’t allow for significant cooperation beyond the community aspect akin to that of a forum.

  Social Networking Sites:  These are very much LIKE blogs only they are intentionally LESS Open. They limit access to groups of connections called “friends” in order to give people more control over who sees and who does not see their content. This control allows you to cater your presentation to your audience better as well as giving you more control over the “product” you receive from the people you view who are generating content for you to consume. Generally these sites provide many presentation customization features so that you can share with your “friends” content that you know will be wanted by them.

  Microblogs:  Microblogs are kinda funny. They use connections like social networks but they default to public access making them more open. The connections are used almost exclusively to determine what you see of other person’s content.  Microblogs are less interactive intentionally then forums and blogs by limiting the size of response and creating a mixed up flow of content that makes it difficult to hold a real conversation with anyone and especially with multiple entities. In practice looking at microblogs you really DON’T see the level of interactive discussion you see in forums. So it would seem almost as if microblogs were a step backwards. Wrong. The proper way of seeing a microblog is through the lens of community built presentational content. The “content” is not the specific tweets/messages, but the STREAM of tweets/messages. That’s content that is cooperatively generated by the community in terms of tiny pieces. In effect it’s like the collage example I gave above. Each person contributes a tiny piece and the users see the whole mesh of all the content generated and combined by their friends.

  Wikis:   Wikis are the first designed to be COMPLETELY cooperative, while HIGHLY presentational, and HIGHLY open system on the internet. Yet at the same time they specifically strive NOT to be very interactive. A wiki, such as wikipedia does NOT include a back and forth discussion of the article presented. While there is discussion on the back pages, it’s not discussion about the article’s content, it’s just discussion about the article’s creation and alteration. It’s a discussion about what should or should not be presented in the article. The interaction then is a part of the cooperative process. Wikis are a huge public cooperation to create a finished static work, even though that cooperation is ongoing and endless. 

  Google Wave:  Google Wave is something new entirely. Based on email, it’s similarly to email and social networking sites in that it’s intentionally by default less open than say a website or a blog. However, it’s like a Wiki in that it facilitates extreme levels of Cooperation but UNLIKE a Wiki it doesn’t sacrifice or reduce the level of Interactivity. Within the group of entities on a Wave, the interaction it facilitates is as much as chat programs, emails and forums.  Right now it’s unclear how much presentational capability you will have with google wave but it looks like that’s not a particularly big focus. Still like email you can make your waves as presentational as you desire for your intended audience. The ability to add waves to “public” allows users to make google wave more open if they so choose.

  ———-

  So what do you think? Are the four categorical principles of PICO a good way to go about understanding internet content generation platforms? Can we use them to fit systems like blogs in a greater context and understand better what to do to make blogging systems better? If not how would you refine the analysis to make the distinctions more clear?

  • 9:00 am
  • 2 Comments