Fire and Motion VI: Streams This is a personal e-mail newsletter from Andrew Montalenti, co-founder & CTO of Parse.ly. You can read the last newslett

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Fire and Motion VI: Streams

This is a personal e-mail newsletter from Andrew Montalenti, co-founder & CTO of Parse.ly. You can read the last newsletter online here.

Mitch Kapor said that “Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a firehose." Indeed. And, it seems the way we have resolved this issue of a firehose of online content is by organizing the mighty blast of data into several fast-moving streams of curated content. The streams are everywhere you look: social networks, mobile apps, and even modern content websites themselves.

The theme of today's Fire and Motion: the rise of the stream.

Streams of consciousness

adler art

Ben Adler has written a wonderful long-form piece on news readership behavior among the younger generation of content consumers, entitled "Streams of consciousness."

In it, he points out a number of important truths about online media today.

Sharing content is a way of expressing an aspect of one's character. Content does not merely have to be "good" to be shared -- it also has to express something about the sharer.

Content has gone multi-type and multi-platform in a big way: not just text, image & video, but desktop, mobile & tablet.

A side effect: more traffic comes through the side doors (individual articles) than front door (homepage). This makes intuitive sense. Audiences are less loyal to brands, and are discovering content through search, social, aggregators, often due to timely or topical relevance rather than brand affinity.

The way to think about online content today is as a mighty river, with many fragmented streams forking off small subsets of content in a variety of directions due to platform, context, topic, and time.

Read "Streams of consciousness"...

Making sense of the flow

glimpse

The sprawl of web content over the last decade was ultimately tamed by the rise of search (notably, Google). What will tame fast-moving content whose lifecycle is measured in hours and minutes rather than months or years?

I have done some thinking about this myself, and summarized my thoughts in the article, "The content trading desk". I see a parallel between fast-moving news stories and the financial markets.

Like in Finance, the world of Media is being turned upside down by the Digitization of Everything. The front-line employees who live in this industry have to establish new competencies that are digitally native. Unsurprisingly, now that content consumption has become a digital experience, it can be more directly tracked and measured — and this data can create important real-time feedback loops for these employees.

One other important parallel is the shape of the data. Content measurement is similar to market measurement: fast-moving time series ticks, loaded with important metadata, full of peaks and troughs. Further, millions of correlations exist between trends in the content ecosystem.

Read "The content trading desk"...

Swimming upstream

And now, for some predictions. In 2008, we visited a few branded web destinations and consumed the content offered therein, while relying on search engines to provide for the "long tail" of needs. In 2012, streams of content from social networks, aggregators, and content personalizers push the content to us, and the various content producers compete with one another for links and clicks on a level playing field across channels and platforms. By 2016, frequency & diversity of content production causes a fever pitch of content consumption.

The only way to master this new market without getting lost in the noise? Empower its key players with the best data analysis and tools.

An exciting time to come. Let's keep moving forward,

Andrew Montalenti
http://parse.ly
http://pixelmonkey.org
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