Actionable content

Today's Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung carries a long article by Stefan Niggemeier titled "Das Publikum an der Macht" (The audience is in power). If you read weblogs on a regular basis there isn't anything new in Niggemeier's article. It's based on the collective wisdom of influential U.S. bloggers Jeff Jarvis and Dan Gillmor, mentions the Washington Post blog saga, talks about new distribution deals for TV series (iPod, DVD), time-shift TV, and the power of user-generated content.

What's interesting however is that time has finally come to make room for such an article in an influential German Sunday newspaper. Niggemeier criticises the blog efforts of various German newspapers that essentially opened up weblogs to give their journalists and editors yet another outlet. While I enjoy watching newspapers experiment with the medium the true power of weblogs is not that it empowers traditional journalists but anyone to create, publish and distribute compelling content (as I said before).

Even more importantly though big media needs to realize that what (many) consumers want is actionable content. Actionable content is content that can be copied, quoted, linkted to, shared, redistributed, mashed up and remixed. In the same way that I can take any print magazine, rip out a page, cut out images and create a collage, consumers want to be able to interact with online content. The infrastructure needed to publish actionalable content is based on permalinks, common file types, creative commons, open standards and APIs. That's what makes weblogs so popular and it's one reason why ePaper or LivePaper is unpopular.

If we are the media, we want to reach as many people as possible. We don't want to create new barriers by inventing new DRM schemas or using proprietary formats. We want to make sure anyone can read, hear or see our content. We use HTML, MP3 or Ogg Vorbis and MPEG-4. We don't lock our content away, we give credit where credit is due, we link to our sources and create a large global network ("the blogosphere"). We consume what we want, when we want and using whichever device we prefer.

Those who create compelling content and ensure that it is actionable will become important players in what is commonly referred to as Web 2.0.

Post scriptum: You can either access Niggemeier's article by paying € 1.50 on the FAZ website or you can simply follow this link to Niggemeier's blog. Guess which source will be linked to more often?