Menace

Monday, 28th April 2008, 1 Comment »

Ambient content

The mere act of ‘existing’ online creates content about you, your life and your relationships with everyone else. I tend to think that content creation falls into 3 rough overlapping categories.

1. Content that is purposely self-generated (your photos posted to Flickr, your blog posts, etc)
2. Content that is based on interaction (Replying to someone at twitter, blog/forum comment)
3. And finally, ambient content

Ambient content creation

Ambient content is basically the creation of content without the express intention of creating content. For example, listening to music and ‘Audioscrobbling’ it to Last.fm is creating content about your listening habits. Your primary act is listening to your favourite band, not creating a personal top 20 of the week.

Ambient content redistribution

A few years ago I worked with someone who would suggest to clients that if they really wanted a blog, it was best that the content be based on naturally created information/discussion within their business rather than forced content creation.

At the time, I ended up creating AudioFlickrscrobbler (combining my Last.fm ‘Recently Listened Tracks’ with Flickr photos) and Weathr (combining Weather reports for cities with Flickr photos) as a way of exploring the idea with a potential programmatic solutions.

With the launch of services like Friendfeed and my increased usage of twitter over the past few months, I decided to finally finished up my own personal content aggregation service last week, and then of Zeldman posted ‘The vanishing personal site‘ today.

Seems this stuff is now on everyone’s minds