October 14, 2008 :: 10:03 PM
Barefoot and Pregnant
Hello, meet the cobbler’s kids, who always need shoes. That is… I’m so busy working on everything else, my own site never gets any attention. About once a month I get fed up, make a token post, resolve to fix the place up… then promptly go back to working on other things, so I can repeat the process in another month or so. So, perhaps I won’t do that this time. Err, exactly.
I spend every day creating content. Producing tons of emails, IMs, reports, lists, task notes, designs, plans, maps… more than I can list, really. Most of it is low value, if you ask me - but this particular post really isn’t about the value of different kinds of communications, so I’ll leave that can of worms closed.
This is actually about thinking I engineer a smarter publishing platform - something that makes it easy to share what’s on my mind, rather than creating more publishing work. Something that becomes a place to capture the content I create that doesn’t seem superfluous - rather than another reason to create content.
It’s a simple idea, really - and the more I thought about it today, the more I began to think about how that might benefit my clients too. Every time we do a new site, that’s always the hurdle - where will the content come from? “We’ll have to create content for the website.” Well, will we? Really? Or do we need to distill our ideas about what we need to share with people and create that, then just make the small efforts needed to share that over multiple mediums? It’s not a new idea, exactly - but it’s definitely one whose time has come.
The idea that producing content equals producing value is a fallacy - most of the time, producing content is about producing noise. And we, the same people who think we’re creating value that way, complain about it in others. Complain about how people could have just said what they meant, complain about the ‘thoughtless’ email forwards we just delete, complain about people who answer our email but not our question, complain complain complain. (Okay, maybe this post will have a little to do with the value of communications.)
Well, we can’t change them - but we can change ourselves, right?
So you’ve seen the barefoot. Here’s where the pregnant comes in - because this time around, I plan to spend my month away giving birth to something better. Something that’s leaner - and more robust because of it. Something that takes less time - and so has more value. Something that means writing less - and offering more because of it. How will I do that? I’m not 100% sure yet - it’s going to involve a little honest review of what really has value and what doesn’t first.
Maybe you’d like to join me - and when we do your website, we won’t have to wonder where the content will come from.
