Skip to main content

Context is King!

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.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Princeton University Press Partners with Tizra to Take Einstein Papers Online

Unprecedented project will make nearly 30 volumes of Albert Einstein's papers available throughout the world. October 9, 2013 (Providence, RI) -- Princeton University Press has selected Tizra as the digital publishing platform it will use to make The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein available online.  One of the most ambitious publishing ventures ever undertaken in the documentation of the history of science, The Collected Papers will ultimately comprise more than 14,000 papers selected from all phases of Einstein's career and fill nearly 30 volumes. The online version hosted by Tizra will provide easy, searchable access to the full archive, and will offer features including: Powerful, bilingual search, with page-specific search results. Links between German text and corresponding English translations. Persistent, page-specific URLs to facilitate citation, referencing and discussion. Easy online viewing in all common web browsers, including those on the most p...

The Best Freaking Web Browsing Machine Ever

Contrary to our recent post, we do not actually believe Apple intended the iPad as a Tizra viewer . For all the talk of Apps and iBooks, the iPad's real significance is that it does a better job than anything we've yet seen of lowering barriers to using the web. You don't have to wait for it to boot up, it doesn't need to be recharged all the time, is small enough to keep on you most of the time, but is big enough that you don't have to squint or scroll too much when reading and can fit enough of your fingers on it to type reasonably well. Plus its touchscreen is intuitive enough and response is fast enough that you don't lose your train of thought while getting from one place to another. As Tim Bray says, " speed is a feature ." All these things come together to create something that enables us to work the web—with all its incredible power to inform and facilitate interaction—into more and more of the corners of our lives where it didn't ...