Have you ever seen a publishing system? I bet you have. Enter new content, move through workflow, publish on site. La-di-da. Same-same all the time.
Have you ever seen an interesting publishing system that makes it possible for you to do something with the content you already have? I bet you haven’t.
How come all publishing systems are so focused on news? Is that where the bulk of interest can be found with the public? I’m not sure. I’m not sure at all. To me, re-packaging material and putting it in context is a core part of the future of media. I can easily see magazines (if that is the future, that is) which are compiled of already existing articles. No new stuff. Who needs more news? I, for my part, need more intelligence.
What to do about that? You can do plenty.
At Voxbiblia.com we have for quite a number of years tried to push our publishing ideas to the Bible publishing world. The notion is that the content – in this case the Bible – is the core of the onion, but in order to be able to navigate such a complex material you need more ways into it.
We have built systems where we de-construct the content (the Bible really consists of roughly 3,000 contextual passages) and make it possible for users, experts and ourselves alike to select, re-package, comment and distribute differently depending on individual preferences; i.e. we work with content we already have and by adding new ways of reaching it, we add new understanding, new distribution channels, new forms of context and – hopefully – new users.
I won’t bore you with details, but it is pretty obvious that you can use the same type of technology for any type of content that is structured and can benefit from being de-constructed and then re-constructed again. Not only other religious texts, but poetry, educational material, short stories, encyclopedical material, comic strips, you name it.
How come it hasn’t been done yet? Beats me, but I guess it is a combination of publishing maturity and legal (the right to re-publish parts of a content in a new context is most times NOT a part of the license agreement…).
For quite some time we have therefore felt like a lone voice crying out in the wilderness. But the last few days a couple of things have happened:
On Tuesday, Google launched its Living Stories project which makes it possible for you to follow an ongoing story, complete with timeline. A good write-up can be found in the New York Times here. Finally! To gather material concerning a specific topic has been done by newspapers for quite sometime now. And before that it was spoken about for another decade or two.
I’m in fact rather surprised that Google took this long to dive into the issue. But now that they have, maybe things will progress with a greater speed. And it would for sure be good to be able to follow an ongoing story from several sources at the same time, even though it still is a little unclear as to when that will happen, since this is a project done in co-operation with the New York Times and Washington Post and each ongoing story currently comes only from one newspaper.
The second piece of news is that a number of Big Publishing Companies, including Time, Condé Nast, the Hearst Corporation, Meredith and NewsCorp have poured an un-specified amount of money (presumably millions) into a new venture that is to experiment with content systems/software to take content to devices in both a richer way than is possible today, but also to devices that yet don’t exist. You can read more about it in the New York Times here.
Now, what will happen to that consortium is yet to be seen. But maybe things finally start to move. Maybe.
If you have any intel or suggestions concerning this field, please let me know.