Though I appreciate boundary pushing by platforms like Medium and Genius, and even Google/Facebook (though that’s a lot more mixed blessing) ultimately, I think the *experience* innovations come from companies that do *both* form and content. Ie vertically delivered content...
Conversation
I think the picture emerging is this:
A) distribution at scale = covered by aggregator theory
B) Form innovations = NYT/Bloomberg as a way to resist aggregators (ie until FB/Google figure out how to “platformize” a form innovation, the verticals have an edge
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...Indie publishers (defined as small 1-2 person WordPress based ops with low/zero capacity for form innovation) can only innovate on content.
New narrative styles, voices, tones, conversational gambits etc.
The “horizontal media innovation” (Medium/Genius) are a conundrum...
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...These players try to generalize a form innovation without a content innovation to go with it. I think this is ultimately weak. They never seem to live up to initial promise.
So Medium ends up being angst journals, Genius struggles to get beyond lyrics markup.
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... I’ll throw one more out there that I thought had promise, but too few people have the chops to actually do it. Stephen Wolfram’s idea of a computational essay:
blog.stephenwolfram.com/2017/11/what-i
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...gap I see in this survey is form experimentation tooling for indies to integrate into existing blogs and things. Need new era in the plugin game basically.
tldr: I want to do things like Bloomberg mall game, but at ribbonfarm scale. WITHOUT an art/game design studio in house.
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...Addendum: many are pointing me to interesting new tools, but that’s the wrong way around! I don’t want to find a new tool and think up a content idea.
I generally have an idea in mind requiring custom (but generalizable) tooling of which I produce the prototype case...
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...Take a minor form “innovation” on ribbonfarm, my Now Reading page. A few others like have adapted it.
ribbonfarm.com/now-reading/
Obvious candidate for a good plugin. One guy offered to pluginize it, but wasn’t clear he’d be able to support it long term.
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Is there some way budget that could be found to pay for it? I'd be glad to help build prototypes for innovative bloggers, *if* I can pay fair wages to the people writing code.
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(My instincts are that bloggers can't afford it, but you might know better.)
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They can’t. At least not with the blog-derived direct income. I’d have to subsidize it, and I’m already at my cross-subsidy limit paying content contributors.

