Content Matters

At BSeC, John Blossom closed the morning with a 15-minute “Think Piece” entitled “Chasing the Mammoth”.  The talk focused on the redefinition of publishing in a social media ecology.

Using the analogy of global climate change and how, in the time of the ice age, people were nomads and owning land was unimportant, John talked about how we are now in an unstable business climate with shifting resources and global trade.  In this market, owning IP is no longer important and the walled gardens and licensing deals of yesterday’s stable market are no longer relevant.

John described how “Social Media powers nomadism in publishing”, moving from corporate production to enabling individual and institutional production in shifting contexts. 

John showed examples of how user-defined context are the new “mammoth”, including:,
* Using Yahoo Pipes to create a custom publication of hedge fund news. 
* Using LinkedIn Answers (with a question I had posted a month or so ago), to show how leveraging a network of peers, I had gathered feedback on books on competitive strategy. 
* Voxant’s Newsroom, where users can grab licensed video content by automatically generating a snippet of code which users can place on their blog or website.
* ASP community builders like Near-time and Ning, which allow you to create a private “MySpace” community.

In closing, he described the “Mammoth culture” as leaner and meaner, tribal, collaborative and mobile.  Publishers need to “let their content graze where it needs to” and understand user behavior in ways most do not today.

John showed how he remains one of a handful of people in this industry who“get” the Web 2.0 world and was able to coherently share relevant examples of what publishers can easily be doing today.