Content Awareness
Yesterday I was at Logan Airport in Boston getting ready to fly out to Seattle for the 360 Flex conference. I stopped in the men’s room, and while there, I noticed something: a Melissa Etheridge song was playing over the speakers.
I thought: wow. This is one of those cases where the wrong content is being played for the audience at hand.
But it brought me to a “duh realization”. A moment where something that should be blindingly obvious is brought into focus in a different way. I thought, you know, content is dumb. A piece of content has no awareness and no context.
If the Melissa Etheridge song knew where it was, it probably would have gone somewhere else.
So to me, this just brought things into perspective a bit more clearly. Rather than making content sentient (endowing, say, a blog post with consciousness is not something I want to try), the holy grail online is the ability to give context to content. We are charged with creating a new, smart system of association between people and content items.
Ready?
Filed under: media discovery, recommendation