Event review: The future of content

SLA Europe DigiComms

Last week, SLA Europe hosted a panel discussion on content creation in the age of interconnectivity, user-generated content and crowdsourcing. Hanna Lewin shares her review of the evening.

The evening started off with David Frigstad, chair of “growth partnership” business consultancy Frost & Sullivan. David explained how the consultancy has moved from 300 page reports delivered by direct mail to “hypersite” delivering powerpoints, videos and live analyst chat to keep customers engaged.  He described his clients as impatient and unwilling to pay for data; data has to be delivered with strategy or predictions (value added), Issues he thinks are important are security, transparency and openness although he said data confidentiality is impossible: everything gets leaked.  David looked to Steve Jobs for inspiration about innovation.  If we want to innovate and deliver the content customers want we should be more open minded.  If Steve Jobs consistently revived declining markets in music, film and computing by using the knowledge he learnt from calligraphy for designing interfaces and a touch of intuition then we can learn from this.

Roger Bamkin, Wikimedia UK Chairman, described his thinking style as not just out of the box but not being able to see the box.  Delivering free information via global voluntary editors and crowdsourcing, he said “we don’t make money we just innovate things”.   If Frost and Sullivan have 3 readers for their traditional reports then Wikipedia articles have a huge audience in the tens of thousands.  Roger certainly engaged with the SLA audience in asking us how companies get to the top of the Google charts – he emphasised linking (over and above complex SEO, keywords and web design).  In terms of news Wikipedia offers a history of news, a meta-news almost although what with wiki news photographers and dispatchers it seems wiki news might just become another news agency.   Controversially, Roger asked do you need an information management strategy at all?  He used examples from the Norwegian weather agency which has released its data to great acclaim and the QRpedia codes (which Roger co-invented but insisted that this didn’t make him notable) and Korean supermarkets.  What I got from this talk was not that I agreed that librarians are necessarily guardians of truth and free information, we buy stuff from vendors for a reason would be an understatement, but that data is more interlinked and that free and paid content can learn from each other.  David had already name-checked Wikipedia before Roger spoke, Roger’s volunteers might not all be knife specialists dependent on Wikipedia for a living.

The last speaker was journalist Nic Newman. He described his thoughts of his chosen career as being confident that he would be able sit back and do what had been done in journalism for 800 unchanged years.  Then he discovered that unfortunately this vision has been gradually dismantled on all fronts, for reasons that will be familiar to most readers of this blog: choice and competition have expanded as online and mobile distribution has caused a loss of monopoly of print and television media where journalists and editors decide what and when people receive news; media is not just social but personal; the volume of media presents new issues about our ability to capture, verify and filter information.  This last point naturally segues into new roles for journalists and indeed, as I thought, information professionals too. So content and media become the same thing (perhaps the medium was always the message to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan), mashups become more commonplace and to stand out from the crowd content is more local and niche.  To survive we have be distinct as people get used to things never being ‘done’ and perpetual beta mode.  I find this all very exciting as this means that as long as we don’t stop striving to meet the content needs of our customers then they will be open to our attempts at better even if they’ve not perfect first time round.

Lots of food for thought then for our own areas of practice and also encouragement to go and edit Wikipedia pages as we know stuff and care about it according to Roger!

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