Comments on: What is content worth these days?

By: Nicola

Nicola — Sun, 10 May 2009 17:06:53 +0000

Apologies if I’ve missed the point between what is content and what is knowledge, but I wonder what the distinction between content and conversation actually is – i.e. if an interesting conversation which either by participating in or simply reading, provides information that I was previously unaware of, so is of some benefit (possibly financial) isn’t that content too?

A marketing agency might find that conversation of similar economic value to how they would have valued a non-user generated piece of content, even if a consumer is not prepared to pay for it themselves, say if it had 2,000 diggs at the bottom of the conversation.

Cisco blogs in a recent series of predictions for the future of collaboration have outlined a specific value of a Mac wiki, to their organisation http://blogs.cisco.com/news/comments/5_predictions_for_the_future_of_collaboration/

I guess though even with this wiki which is continually updated, the value might change if they suddenly had a huge upsurge in Cisco employees using netbooks there would be some depreciation in value over time.

By: The importance of collaboration in networks and communities « Suifaijohnmak’s Weblog

Thu, 07 May 2009 01:11:44 +0000

[...] 7, 2009 · No Comments I full agree with George views on What is content worth these days - while valuable for learning – has limited economic [...]

By: John Connell

John Connell — Wed, 06 May 2009 09:05:39 +0000

At about the same time, George, I was working my way around the whole education community in Scotland helping everyone I met to think about the potential benefits of a national learning platform of some kind (although we did not call it that at the time). Whenever I spoke to feet-on-the-ground teachers and headteachers, the one thing they all wanted was ’stuff’. To teachers, content was king, to coin a phrase.

Only a very few that I spoke to ever mentioned collaboration. In Donald Rumsfeld’s terms: ‘we don’t know what we don’t know.’

I was always absolutely sure that, once the national platform was established, collaborative applications would prove to be of more use in the classroom than mere content. Currently, in Glow, Scotland’s national learning platform, it is the collaborative tools that are surging ahead in terms of day-to-day usage by teachers and students around the country.

Content is important, but, as Harold says above, community is much more valuable.

By: Duncan Gotobed

Duncan Gotobed — Wed, 06 May 2009 05:14:55 +0000

With so much content out there – I think the added value lies in selecting, editing and communicating it in an easily understandable way.

By: Harold Jarche

Harold Jarche — Tue, 05 May 2009 22:51:29 +0000

I think that content’s value can be defined as the context in which it is valued, divided by its age. The value of content goes down over time, especially as free substitutes become available. On the Net, information wants to be free. Only if the content meets the very specialized needs of a particular context will it be valuable, so not all content has tangible worth.

My examination of business models around online learning content show that it’s important but community is much more valuable.