YakShaving

{Sorry it’s been a while — I just moved to the Best Coast and have been getting settled and heads down in UX work}

I’m a big believer in business models for content based on augmentation, contextualization, and personalization. I was chatting with an old friend from Michigan EECS, Elias, and we came up with an example that’s been around for just a little while… — the Talmud. Now, I don’t know any Hebrew, but from what was explained to me — when you open the book there’s a large block of justified type, and around it, augmented layers of content by people. Over time, the border of content — the interpretations have grown while the original text has not changed.

Of course, it works really well in a religious text that is open to interpretation, but I believe that most interests and subjects work in a similar way.

In parallel with content consumption changing, the nature of content creation has dramatically morphed as well. Publishers and producers are much more willing to put out rough copies of content, see it augmented, and change on the fly. Eventually, they’ll press a giant “Publish” button that takes all that content and whams it together into a clean copy worthy of general consumption. Similar to the shift in power from producers to consumers in manufacturing and services, the lines are blurring a lot more between content producers and consumers. That “Publish” button grows a lot more figurative by the day.

One byproduct of this change is that it’s become a lot more common to push out content in rough form and get feedback on it, being responsive and adapting when necessary to fit the consumer.

Below are just a few examples of interesting constructs and blogs/sources in the brave new world of publishing that I’ve been tracking.

• if:book The defacto place to go for a continuously updated source of what’s happening with the future of the book. Love the name!
• The Knight News Challenge Gotta love “Xprize” type contests to solve problems.
• BookSquare – Used to be updated more often, but has some good stuff on it
• The New Everyday — Check out what they call “Middle State Publishing”
• Page 99 Test: Test one page of your book, and if people like it, they’ll buy it
• TenPages — Similar to Page 99, except it includes crowdfunding
• Leanpub – People in the Startup World are no strangers to LeanPub, as the venturehacks bible is a collection of blog entries (a darn good one at that)
• Corante Many to Many — Not updated anymore, but great essays by luminaries like Shirky.
• Lou Rosenfeld media — “Book Prototypes” — Being a Business Designer, I naturally love the idea.
• O’Reilly’s Open Feedback Publishing System. I *heart* O’Reilly and everything about it, so I am keen in seeing how this works out. Right now, it seems too “techy” for the masses, but it works GREAT for new programming languages – e.g. Rails3 in a nutshell
• DailyLit – Snack portions of best sellers
• Authonomy Crowds as Editors.. Hmm, good idea, but all about execution. I keep thinking of the Netflix prize — Experts are better than friends!
• Flipboard– If you haven’t used Flipboard yet, you’re missin’ out kids. It’s more about consumption, but peer production (or at least sharing) is a dominant theme
• BettrAt, my company. More on this coming soon {wink}
• KaPost, tangentially related (more news than long-form content) is a Techstars company changing how the newsroom works

I personally think we’ll find that “interleaving” (and the benefits it confers, like personalization) as an experience *and* a business model will become a larger trend that’s here to stay. Al Ries and Jack Trout tell us that selecting brands are shortcuts to decision making; In the same vein, people make choices about which publications and content to consume based on other people who are reading the same publication. Models which interleave peer feedback with your own are ripe candidates for disrupting incumbents with static models of content production/consumption.