The Revolution of Content — Sponsored by Mobile Devices

There is an inter­est­ing arti­cle on the Huff­in­g­ton Post site by Ramon Nuez that does a good job of lay­ing out the case dis­rup­tion in the con­tent arena will only inten­sify. The cat­a­lyst, in his opin­ion, that super­charges this rev­o­lu­tion is mobile. In par­tic­u­lar video snip­pets that will be con­sumed on the run.

Let’s exam­ine this hypoth­e­sis under the micro­scope of life. We can all agree that much of the video con­tent placed on the web holds no value to any­one out­side of the indi­vid­ual upload­ing the clip and per­haps a few of their cohort. How­ever, what I’ve and Nuez have noticed is that there has been a sig­nif­i­cant increase of infor­ma­tive and inspir­ing con­tent. I have found myself more and more often prob­ing the web for ‘how to’ videos on sub­jects of inter­est. Within the results that turn up there is sur­pris­ingly well done free con­tent.

Com­bin­ing this with the Mor­gan Stan­ley esti­mate that by 2014 the mobile Inter­net will over­take the sta­tic Inter­net one much con­clude that smart­phone and tablets will be the num­ber one con­tent inter­face. My rea­son­ing for why mobile takes the num­ber one inter­face spot is sim­ple. Phones are very per­sonal devices. We cus­tomize them visu­ally and audi­bly to per­son­ify our likes, inter­ests, and over­all personality.

One need not step for­ward three to four years to see that a highly per­sonal, in the pocket device that can com­mu­ni­cate in three modes — visual, audi­ble, and writ­ten — opens up many ways for con­tent providers to fur­nish very rich expe­ri­ences. Ser­vices like Foursquare and Face­book are just now work­ing their way beyond the tip of the iceberg.

What will really bust us through the wall is when pub­lish­ers and authors truly absorb and lever­age dig­i­tal / mobile oppor­tu­ni­ties. Just as many of the cut­ting edge ad agency rede­fined their oper­a­tional model pulling dig­i­tal pro­duc­tion and tech­nol­ogy assets in-house to be able to present cross-media plat­form ini­tia­tives we might find pub­lish­ers doing the same.

For those of you still in doubt just ask Ama­zon, the com­pany that earned a bil­lion plus dol­lar val­u­a­tion by mov­ing tons of books. Accord­ing to their esti­mate (brought to my atten­tion via Mash­able) sales of e-books titles will over take paper­back sales by the end of 2011. 

I don’t have one of these devices; not sure if it’s because most of my read­ing is busi­ness related books and mag­a­zines (low vol­ume pub­li­ca­tions). All of which, how­ever, are finally mov­ing into dig­i­tal forms. I must admit that being able to make detailed notes right in the book would be a pro­duc­tiv­ity boost. Espe­cially since they will be cat­a­log for easy retrieval.

I guess we should put one more notch on the rev­o­lu­tion­ary belt because I have a strong feel­ing that I’ll be mov­ing to full dig­i­tal con­sump­tion by year end.