Content (is king)

On the internet, content is king. No matter how pretty the virtual storefront, or how stylish your .asp coding and java applets are, a site will suffer without a reason for the browser to be there.

This is something that as host to a small personal web site I’ve been acutely aware of for years. The blog I have here now is the closest I’ve ever come to continual and interesting content.

The problem is that content is changing now, too.

Stricly speaking, Jason-Preston.com has a decent amount of material; I keep the blog updated, there’s an (occasional) podcast, seven videos to download and I’ve uploaded a total of three audioblogs. For one person in three months, that’s not too bad.

But before too long the only thing that will really be applicable is the blog.

Web 2.0 has essentially forced people to start treating content as interactive. Wikipedia is one of the most successful sites on the internet because it utilizes the amazing power of user-generated content. Yahoo! is (Times! Select only) on the same track, according to the NYT. Even TV is headed in the user-generated direction with Al Gore’s Current TV.

What makes the web spin, as it were, is the way that people can contribute to the worldwide conversation. Someone has to set the debate topics (content generators), but viewers had better have a voice.