Web 2, Content 1
Obviously there should be some clever dot nomenclature in that title to make it more obvious, but that would have made it it just, well, too obvious, and besides, I didn’t fancy the idea of what the permalink would look like and since when have I written a meaningful title anyway.
Maybe you’ve read this far. Maybe you only got the first line in your reader and so you haven’t seen this line and I wasn’t interesting enough to make you get this far. I’ll probably end up putting some screen grab or other in here later to make it look nice and as for the Sun template, that makes everything I write look nicer than it really is, which makes me seem more authoritative, when obviously I’m not. But you might not see that either.
If you grew up with the ‘content is king’ mantra stuck on your huge CRT monitor with a post-it note in the late 90s, and you were devising a strategy for your web content that was focused clearly on what you had to say, rather than how it looked, then welcome back to relevancy. As we’ve (the royal we’ve) integrated web 2.0 capabilities further into our core publishing architectures, and in many cases, foregone ownership of publishing technologies altogether, we’ve willfully opted back into html 1.0. Sure, we have open, distributed platforms that mean we can write once, publish multiple and aggregate endlessly (how fun was it to make recursive feeds of yourself on natuba, before it turned into some weird iphone freakshow?), but how can I squeeze my multimedia in there, or my flash-based corporate profile? Answer is, you can’t. Not really. Not without accepting that things will end up a bit, well, not exactly how you want them. Of course, you can publish a bookmark to your 1.0 web site, which looks as fantastic as it ever did, and even has all the pixels in the right place, if you’re using the right browser/OS combination, natch, but an RSS feed? What kind of losers want to read that stuff?
If you’ve spent 17 hours updating your blog template, like I often do, to get the icons left aligned and the text justified and just the right size, then you’ve just fallen into the pit marked ‘waste of time’, where you’ll find me. Of the 17 people that read anything I ever write, about 16 of them have probably subscribed via google reader or bloglines or something, which means that all formatting has disappeared and my carefully crafted font is now 19 inches tall and my in-line images are not in-line at all, but a huge page break in the middle. Mind you, of those 16 people, only 6 of them are actually reading, the others are just marking it as ‘read’. In fact, I’m the only one who cares, but even I don’t care anymore. I’m writing everything with html 1.0 as the lowest common denominator, which means at least I get to right-align my images, but not much else. It’s quite nostalgic. I might dig out my copy of Mosaic and see how things look. And then take a ride on my space hopper or something.
Listening Post: John Martyn: Certain Surprise