Question: Which Comes First, Content or Product? Answer: Steve Jobs.
There are many, many quotes, stories, and the like you may (probably) have read about Steve Jobs in the past five days. Don’t stop reading; this is not another one. This is a quote of a quote, posted on Mashable, that points at the relationship between content and platform (and how Jobs influenced it). From Adam Cahan, Yahoo media products vice president:
“In my mind, Steve Jobs represents a seismic shift from content to product. It’s hard to internalize but having been within large media organizations there’s always a belief that content alone will drive audiences, build platforms, determine winners.
“What Steve did was to ignite our passions for products … from Google to Facebook these are entire organizations and businesses that have styled themselves after Apple placing a critical importance on product — information and user design, quality of experience, simplicity of form and function.”
There’s no denying the public’s passion for products, Apple and other. Reading this brought up an interesting question, for me: Can the market now push content based on the products that carry it as successfully as it can push products based on the content they can carry?
Read the rest of this quote, and some other quotes, at mashable.com.
News Site Getting Mobile
And on that note, Econsultancy talks about a recent investigation into Financial Times readership by Paul Scrivens. He noted that the news site draws three times as many page views through their mobile app as through their traditional browser site. His conclusion: “When you provide quality content mixed with a design that gets out of the way of your users then they enjoy the experience more.” Amen. And that doesn’t just go for mobile, people: Quality content will always enhance user experience, on large, small, and IRL interfaces alike.
Read the rest at econsultancy.com.
Who’s Running This Show?
If all this talk of products and mobile and mobile products has you shaking a little in your writerly boots, here’s a comforting reminder from Copyblogger that writers are far from defunct.
