April 23, 2006

The Wisdom of Crowds and Content 2.0

So I was doing some unpacking today and managed to crank through about two thirds of James Surowiecki’s excellent book The Wisdom of Crowds. The fact that I was able to get over halfway done with this book on a day when I was doing mundane stuff around the house is Reason #163 that I love audio learning. Seriously, this is a book that given my current schedule I would not have had the time to read anytime soon.

But something else struck me when I was listening to it. A couple of weeks ago I listened to a presentation that Surowiecki had given at South by Southwest (listen here). In it he hits most of the highpoints of The Wisdom of Crowds book. And he does it in less than an hour (contrast this with the unabridged audiobook which runs about ten hours).

Which of these has more value to the listener?

That’s a really good question. Although I’m a big fan of unabridged audiobooks that fact of that matter is that the SXSW presentation hit the key points and anecdotes in the books, was delivered by the author himself and cost…nothing.

If this was the first time that I had encountered something like this it might not have registered for me. But it isn’t. I’ve come across this before from people like Thomas Friedman (The World Is Flat), David McCullough (1776) and Malcolm Gladwell (Blink). Indeed, all of these (free) presentations by the authors do a pretty good job of summing up their books.

My gut is telling me that there’s a new form of content emerging here. It’s shorter than Content 1.0 (think one hour presentation from the author rather than ten hour unabridged audiobook). It’s more personal than Content 1.0 (think the author talking about her book in her words rather than her book read by a narrator). And it’s quite possibly more entertaining than Content 1.0 and certainly more efficient (I could listen to 10 author presentations in the same time that I could listen to one unabridged audiobook).

It’s not Cliff Notes. It’s not Soundview Executive Book Summaries. It’s something entirely new (at least I think so). I’m going to call it Content 2.0 and leave it at that for now. But I’ll be back with more later… 🙂