Content is still king. I’m thinking here, initially, about blog posts but I also want to extend this thought to other forms of communication.
An old hobby-horse of mine is the empty, redirecting blog post: I can’t stand them. Almost nothing irritates me more than a blog post that is merely a “pointer” to some other content on the Internet. Worse still is the post that is a pointer to a blog post which itself is merely a pointer to some further content. And so on.
I am stressing merely there (and here) because I think there is a useful place for secondary and even tertiary communications. A post that merely points to some other post is little more than a contextless citation. A post that, in the course of making some point or other, provides a link to some supporting documentation or content about which it is commenting employs secondary communication. There are even some sensible posts that are really tertiary communications surveying, often, a set of secondary communications. I can see the point of such posts or even such web pages though, yes, they tend to come from librarians.
But I would maintain that content, i.e. primary communication, is still king. Ultimately no matter how much fluttering you have (or need), communication is still about communicating content. And what is content? It might be an opinion (ideally backed up with reasons, but we can only hope). It might be substantive research. It might be reasoned argument, an amusing anecdote, a description, or a story.
I can illustrate this with the posts from this very blog. Looking at the stats that are available on the blogger dashboard I can see that some posts attract a considerably larger number of views over time than others. (And no, this series on communications is not one of my big hitters.) By orders of magnitude.
Which brings me to Twitter. I was wondering whether or not my observations would hold true in the land of 140 characters. And it seems that even there content rules. If you look at the tweets of those with massive numbers of followers, you will find that only the tiniest percentage of those tweets are pointers to some other content and almost none of them are contextless citations or mere pointers. Even on Twitter, primary communication is still valued.
This might be a good opportunity to raise a related point.
Twitter tweets, and FaceBook (FB) status updates did (although I don’t think they do anymore), constrain the tweeter to a limited number of characters. Since some URLs are long, possibly very long, there is a clear need for some way to provide shortened URLs for the links one wishes to share. Fortunately there are very useful services that provide just that: http://bit.ly/ and http://tinyurl.com/ . Using these services you can transform a lengthy URL into something manageable. Great. The downside, of course, is that the now minuscule URL gives no clue as to the site it will take me to if I should click on it. Maybe that isn’t a problem for most people, but I like to know where I’m going (as far as that is reasonably possible) on the Internet. Combine an obscured URL with an already constrained communications window of 140 characters and you have a near-recipe for the contextless citation.
It appears I’ve finally found something I dislike even more than a blog post that merely points me somewhere else. It’s a tweet that points me somewhere else and doesn’t give me any real clue as to where it is pointing me. Now there is a metaphor for something or other!
Cave imitator. Let the follower beware.