Big Idea 2013: Unbundling Media
My big idea for 2013 is actually very small. Much smaller than this article.
You see, while the sharing of news stories on social media has boomed in recent years, I often find myself wanting to share just one part of an article. For instance, if I see a quote I like, I'd like to share that to my Twitter account. Or if I see an image within an article, I sometimes want to share just that picture to my Pinterest page. Sometimes I want to share just the video embedded in a news story, not the news story itself.
That's why my prediction for 2013 is the rise of "microcontent sharing".
Media is increasingly becoming unbundled, with news stories being consumed separately from the magazine, newspaper or blog that created them. For instance, news stories from multiple sources are reassembled based on social shares by mobile aggregators like Flipboard. Personalized news readers – like Zite – aggregate stories based on your interests. And localized news readers, like the new iPhone app Spun, aggregate news stories specific to your location. In every instance, the news is "unbundled" from its source, then reassembled for the reader based on his or her social networking connections or personal interests.
This unbundling is often good for readers because it allows for a more tailored experience.
Microcontent sharing takes this to the next level: What if you could break down an article into its constituent parts and share them independently? Perhaps one day aggregators could reassemble not just articles into a personalized newspaper, but also individual quotes, images and videos?
I'm so excited about microcontent sharing that we've implemented it into the new Mashable.com. If you visit an article on the site and hover over an image or quote, we provide options to share that piece of content to your social networks. We hope to take this idea even further in future iterations, but it's a start.
So that's my little prediction: In 2013, the "next big thing" will be small.
Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, chris_lemmens
Author and Screenwriter
11 年Great idea. I'm a writer - Hollywood screenwriter and author - but I find I like shorter and shorter bursts of info. That's why I thought my online pal Nick D'Aloisio's Summly was such a great idea - as did Yahoo. Twitter especially has changed the way we think and communicate. I remember studying what we called "précis" (condensing text into shorter forms) in England at school and loving it. The art is in conveying an immense amount of information in a few words - and providing a hyperlink or links to give detail. I'm pondering the place of novels in a society like this - maybe they're important because our brains also need the exercise of focusing on long narratives and subtleties of character and thought, rather like meditation. Of course, this entire long post defeats my argument!
Executive Customer Relations Rep
11 年embroidered stories will trend soon... people will get hook making and creating stories from other SNS' videos, images and alike...
Co-Founder & Chief Marketing Officer @ Demand Frontier | CHIEF Member
11 年Pete - I love your take on small media. We are already operating that way with content strategy trends....why not have a way to further exploit the individual parts and juicy tidbits. Spread your message even further.
Chief HR Officer - CHRO, Workforce Developer, Board Member (Oil & Gas, E&P, Solar Energy, Offshore Wind, Maritime, Manufacturing)
11 年Microcontent sharing - bite size content for sharing specific information / data!
Drupal Web-developer / IT Consultant
11 年useful info!