John Blossom's post on traditional portal strategies resonated with my recent thinking about aggregation sites (Shorelines: portals Passe). I made his post into a silly slogan for my subject line, but he is making a good case that even in the "piling things up" business, there are potential problems with actually piling them up.
Reading it, for a minute, I had a pang about Tizra. You might be able to read it as saying that it's not worth building your own content collection at all, but I don't think that is the practical point for publishers. I think that the notion of stressing context and tuning product offerings to user groups is exactly what we enable with our product and content management tools. You need to have a branded presentation of your content to all your different audiences, and make every audience an offer that they want to buy. That takes a lot of flexibility, which is what we've concentrated on. That flexibility should be on tap, not the endpoint of a 6-figure software development project, and control should be with publisher, not the vendor, so that you can make lots of offers and keep software development out of the picture.
Any branding, content organization, or product definition change that you have to rely on someone else to make is a potential lost opportunity, especially in a world where context is king.
... Of course this doesn't mean you shouldn't hire a designer, just that all of your communication loops should be as short and non-technical as possible.
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