monkeymedia

Have been working on MonkeyMedia.net for a few months now.
We just launched the new site. Now what.
Time to start dancing I guess.

Content, design patterns and relationship porn

Listening to a speaker talk about News. And what news is.
It’s a seminar on Social Media by the good people at Geist. It’s a great event, good value. And as the speaker goes on it occurs to me that News is worse than we thought.

The pattern of content delivery, whether it is the CNN News musical intro, or New York Times masthead and navigation structure, is the brand that has the value. It is “high concept.” Like a sitcom bible and story arc, it is King, it is the primary design pattern that earns the most money. The content writes itself under that banner.

But people today are stepping past the brand banner and are entering a world that is about designing-my-own-interface. They are picking out “content” according to what they want, and putting it on their blog, facebook profile page, igoogle page, and browser home page. It is a collage of brands and branded content and floating stories.

But in the end, even this doesn't do much for us...what lies under the hunger for stories, is as critical as the relationships that hover under our bits of gossip. This strata is independent of publishing, independent of story. The real deal isn’t concrete content, or even my brand pattern.

Maybe we like bits of news content, because they distract us and feed our desire. If so, fair enough. But there should be a struggle IMO: probably worth considering thinking, in the background, that as I consume this content, that what I am building and reading is a kind of relationship porn.

An Ecobitz design pattern gag: