YouthNet blog
An insight into youth issues, volunteering trends, charity life and more from the UK charity YouthNet
All | Events | Youth | Technology | Volunteering | YouthNet | Charity World
Friday May 05, 2006
Content is (still) king
Amid all the talk about new media technologies at the We Media conference this week, there was little if any mention of discussion boards. Even the term sounds old-fashioned. So-oo nineties.
But they're still here. On YouthNet's website TheSite.org, for example. They haven't really changed that much over the years. They haven't needed to. They work.
Another subject that doesn't seem to have been mentioned much at We Media is content. "Content is king" also belonged in the nineties. But it's still relevant.
If you need proof, look at all the blogs (eg from the BBC and The Guardian) reporting live from the We Media Conference. Duller reading is hard to imagine. They are information for information's sake. A triumph of quantity over quality.
Ten years ago Bill Gates wrote an article headed Content is King:
One of the exciting things about the Internet is that anyone with a PC and a modem can publish whatever content they can create. In a sense, the Internet is the multimedia equivalent of the photocopier. It allows material to be duplicated at low cost, no matter the size of the audience.
That sounds a little old-fashioned - new technologies have made it a pretty sophisticated photocopier. But his central argument still holds. Whether it's on discussion boards or blogs (or new media conferences), it's still the content that counts.
Posted by Tom Green ( 9:03 AM ) Link to this post Comments[0]