I read an article a while back that was an interview with Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly. In this article Kelly says he did some calculations and figured out that all the music that has ever been recorded could fit onto a six-terabyte disk. He goes on to say that once you had such a collection, you’d still be faced with the question, “What do I listen to?” It was natural for me to extend that thinking to written content. If I owned every piece of literature ever written, how would I decide what to read?
Then yesterday in Scott’s MMR, he pointed us to an excellent article on the Measuring Measures blog about how publishers are still trying to use new media, like the iPad, to prop up old financial models such as subscriptions. The author makes a very strong argument that the new model of financial gain in content creation is to syndicate small bits of information and let them flow freely throughout the Internet, using built in micropayment systems to reimburse the content creators whenever someone accesses their content.
For a long time, information in our culture has been configured in such a way that I have ultimate flexibility to pick and choose what I want, and create a custom-made product that fits my needs. Witness the number of churches that go through the grueling effort of writing their own curriculum when there are dozens of prepackaged products out there that offer the same thing. We want products that work for us 100%, not 60 or 70%.
I stopped reading and watching the news a long time ago. There was just so much information I didn’t care about that I decided it wasn’t worth wading through it all to find the 5% I was interested in. I got a DVR so I could skip the commercials in lieu of the television content I really wanted. I spend an hour on Netflix reading movie reviews to gain some sort of assurance that I’ll enjoy the next 90-minute feature I watch.
So here’s the billion dollar idea–I need some system (configured according to my interests) that will grab only the bits and pieces of our world that I want or need to know about. It will learn what to grab based on other things I have enjoyed. When I want to move my Sunday School class into a discussion on interpretations of the atonement, it can grab relevant paragraphs and chapters–not entire book-length works–to inform my interest. It will know I am not interested in Farmville, but that I am interested in photos of my friends and their families. It will know that I want only one or two articles of news relevant to my local community, a couple on my favorite sports teams, and a few on major world events. It will prioritize the writings of my favorite authors, and will know when they aren’t my favorites anymore. It will aggregate all of these things into a single source so that I do not have to refer to half-a-dozen apps, web sites, and blogs. And for this service, I will pay the same amount that I might have paid for an annual newspaper subscription in the past, and all the content creators will get a cut (like CCLI for printed material).
And of course, to make it all work, publishers will have to figure out how to break their content into small packages (by the paragraph?) and let it flow into the ether so that it is ready and waiting to be plucked from the Internet based on my interests.
Is that too much to ask?
source: Will Lion
It is good to hear that is it okay to not care about everything. As I got older, I was under the impression that to be an adult meant caring about politics, world events, and actively involved in local debates.
When our church was out feeding the homeless, I asked "an adult" about a world event I heard in passing the night before, she looked at me and said: "How do you expect to minister to people if you don't know what is happening in the world????" I didn't say anything, but I thought, "er, how 'bout I give the starving guy some food and tell him about Jesus?"
I think you have a good idea here, give us the stuff we care about and don't waste my time with the stuff that just isn't important or relevant to me. I suppose it is great if others want to freak out about the monetary exchange rates in Europe but that just isn't my cup of tea, er, can of Dr. Pepper.