Changing Face of Content

For any website, to keep up, having a live community around it is very important. This is what makes them lively, increases page views and affects revenues. My belief is as we move into the future, people would like to access content not in the way content providers provide, but the way users want it. Already aggregation services like bloglines, RSS etc. are showing this up. But this is just a small part of the whole big shift that's occuring slowly.

People use different tools like Yahoo Mail, some different calendar tools, native address books etc. But getting and combining information is still a lot difficult. When I want to email someone using Yahoo, I need to find contact information from a different address book tool. Or I cannot club up all different emails in one place. Current solution is to choose a provider which provides a package of all such services. But this is equivalent to NO solution.

Semantic Web wants to solve this problem via building complex ontologies. I think that makes it more than complex. My view is content providers need to publish interfaces to any thing that they publish. So no just pure HTML, publish REST style interfaces, publish SOAP interfaces or just pure XML structured content. Any application that exists today, calendar tools, email, e-groups, messaging - everything needs to have an external interface.

There are lot more smarter people/companies on internet who can combine information in interesting ways to give smarter solutions. Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Ebay are already doing interesting stuff. RSS is just a beginning, other mature things will follow soon.

Where do content providers stand in this? Will they not loose revenue in this ? Why will they do it?

They will need to do it, because users want such services. User need will drive such a change. May be in short term they loose revenue, but I think solutions will appear which will give revenue to content provider and at the same time make things more usable for the users.

One can make use of the application/ content interfaces for delivering simple, powerful and effective services to the user on mobile devices. Wireless which provides an easy model for doing micropayments will enable a much bigger revenue model for the content provider.