Paper.li – content as raw material
Here is an interesting thingy brought to my attention courtesy of Neville Hobson. Not sure whether it will take off, but I will give go just to try it out. Essentially it creates a piece of content (that it will call, in perhaps an unconciously retro way, my Daily Newspaper) out of my Twitter connections.
This is one more example of the fact that content can no longer be considered a finished product, only ever a raw material. It only becomes a finished product in the hands of its’ consumer, and even then that content can be spun back out into the social maelstrom. In effect, content is created via acts of interogation or connection rather than publication. This is the Big Thing that newspapers (and other traditional content publishers) can’t get their heads around, as I have logged previously.
It also is another example (along with a Twitter tag) of McLuhan’s lightbulb – a medium that has no content of its own, but creates a social effect through the space it brings into being.