Bugs Worked On for May 2008
My 5-A-Day contributions for May 2008:
Content Hacking
Televison and radio content comes in programmes which are carefully planned and organised — ie. “programmed” — from first idea to finished product. The sames goes for most of the traditional printed publications like novels, short stories and newspaper articles. This process is very similar to the way most major software used to be written for a long time. In the IT industry, this changed dramatically with the advent of Free and Open Source software and now huge projects like the Linux kernel are developed largely by volunteers in their free time. This ad-hoc way of contributing to software projects as the individual sees fit is often described as hacking. I am seeing a similar revolution taking place in the content space right now. A shift from conventional publishing with a high barrier of entry to more liberal ways of creating and sharing art, music and text as well as audio and video content. I recently came up with the phrase content hacking to describe this new movement.
This new hacked together type of content (think podcasts, blogs, videocasts and free audio books) is not necessarily of lesser quality than the traditional programmed media — just like the Linux kernel is in no way inferior to, let’s say, the Windows one. The old media companies might want to tell you that but that is because they are scared. The publishing business is dying, the music industry has pretty much commited suicide and the movie industry is seeing the headlights of a freight train coming their way, too. Just as companies like Microsoft are scared by Open Source and have no sensible way of dealing with it, their media counterparts are starting to experience the same issues. Embrace, extend, extinguish just does not work if your “enemy” is made up of thousands and thousands of people all over the world. For us creators of this kind of content, all this means that we have to be especially aware of the strong points that the role of hacker brings with it in general: a hacker does not get payed for what he does (at least not immediately), he does whatever he does because he loves the process of doing it. Exactly this is what makes his work so much superior to the programmes his payed-by-the-hour competitors crank out. Granted, there is no “business model”, but those are overrated anyway — there was no business model at Google when they started out either… This all means you either need to aquire venture capital (a pretty risky process) or you cannot start off by doing what you do fulltime. In itself, that isn’t exactly a bad thing either since that did not seem to stop the legends behind the big Free Software projects or, in the content field, people like Leo Laporte, Scott Sigler or Jono Bacon — who can either support their side project through their “day job” or have even found a source of income by doing what they started to do for fun.
Call me crazy, but I believe content hacking will go somewhere. There’s a revolution happening and I plan to be part of it. We need some people outside of Silicon Valley in on the thing, after all. The way in which we consume content is already changing and the process in which this content is created will also alter itself pretty dramatically. I know that I am by no means the first one to predict this (especially some podcasters have been saying this for about two to three years now), I guess it’s just my way to formalise my thoughts on the topic. I was never big into social science or business theory, but I think I can spot patterns of historical proportions when I see them. Anyway, I have decided to concentrate my personal efforts in “user-created content” — chief among them being Linux Outlaws — in this space. Proliferation of the Internet (especially when free wifi and cheap broadband connections become truly ubiquitous), Free Software, the demise in quality of traditional content will eventually all come together and form a big wave, and when that happens I plan to come out on top. And if that doesn’t fly, I aim to at least have as much fun in the process as I can. Fun is the most important part of hacking, after all.