Online content is taking off. Brands are increasingly acting as publishers, and that is interesting. The question is: what can brands add to the national (and global) content cloud? How far should they go in their search for relevant stories, or is unique content perhaps a lot closer to home?
And then it was there, the content cloud. The invisible content box, from which everything and everyone can eat, that synchronizes content between all your devices, that indexes it and makes it findable. Our collective digital memory. A good example of what this cloud can do is illustrated by Apple's cloud service. The computer giant offers all users 5 GB of online storage, with the result that 145,003 ,578 copies of Nirvana's Nevermind had to be stored on Apple's servers. A waste of space, they thought, and they introduced iTunes Match . With this, only one copy of the album is online and it is accessible to everyone who has bought the album. Saves about ten server farms and a lot of money.
With iTunes Match, content is deduplicated, like stickers in a Panini football book. In the tangle of content, this is an elegant solution. It offers a glimpse of the future of online content. What would be left if other content were deduplicated as well? All city trips to London in one pile? All tiramisu recipes together? Which content retains its relevance and value? What is unique and hard enough to continue to exist? As a brand, you don't have to look far for that: that is in any case all content around your own product.