Latency everywhere
A couple of weeks ago I stumbled upon a post by Vimeo’s community manager Dallas Verdugo showing how this video that had been published a year and a half ago had gotten, at that point, 90% of it’s traffic in the last 4 days. I.e. the web is not traditional television.
What I like about this is that it’s yet another example about the strength of asynchronous possibilities. Loads of content is produced every minute, almost nothing of it is relevant to me right now. But a certain percentage of that content will be relevant for me many times in the future.
Clay Shirky discuss this concept in depth in Here comes everybody and propose that every webpage is a latent community. At some point or rather at different times for different people the content of any webpage is relevant to discuss among friends and people.
Vimeo’s ambition is to be a video community for your closest peers (even if it more resembles a kind of artistic social network of video producers) so they’ve enabled and promoted the discussion to take place. But what made it all of a sudden get that traffic spike? The discussion started when Gizmodo published it which certainly got the snowball rolling.
Since we’re all publishers we also are in need to find good stuff as input to the content creation hence the relevance of time is not important however prior attention might be.
If your publishing new content to your shared audience, like a video or a photo, it can be 50 years old and still be good content but if it’s the content that everyone else in the ecosystem discussed 1 month ago you’ll just seem out of touch. How freaking neat would it be to post about Christian the lion now? Pretty piss poor.
“New” content can be anything that hasn’t been published in your publishing ecosystem but doesn’t need to be new in terms of time.
Enabling a discussion around all of your content is a key ingredient. What ever your content might be it will probably be relevant to a fair sum of people at different times. So the discussion will take place, where and when is irrelevant.
But a key success factor for online discussions is to let people who has participated in the discussion at some point be notified that the discussion has continued, even if it’s a week, a month or a year later (for example Jaiku does this pretty well). Stimulating discussions to take off yet again, as a new discussion arise all prior participants gets notified and are drawn back to the dialogue. Creating value through context (=content?).
Photo by Jim O’Connell
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