The New Mating Dance

I'm calling my new company Content Bridges.  Content Bridges aims to help bring old media and new media -- perhaps quaint, but still useful terms -- to the table. And once at the table, Content Bridges aims to help translate vocabularies and mindsets to make good deals happen. To find ways to jump, sidestep or fly over the chasms.

Circa 2005, there's a new mating dance going on in the digital content world, reminiscent of the mid-'90s and the turn-of-the-century. This time, though, the stakes are higher.

Internet-delivered content is a key, daily part of readers' lives. Technologies have finally developed to make delivery faster and easier, to track it and to monetize it. The early destination-site driven businesses of content owners and publishers have proven themselves out -- and proven not to be enough. Consumers  want to be able to find stuff right now, to save it, send it, reprint it and use it. Cellphones have lost their glamour and become an indispensable part of daily life, and increasingly  a location-aware info appliance. Citizen journalists and bloggers (creating their own content at the rate of a blog per second) upend many notions of what journalism and public service are all about. Cross-platform delivery, seamless as it can be, is the mandate of the day for anyone in the content business.

ON THE DANCE FLOOR

Who's on the dance floor?  Publishers and owners of content. Traditional aggregators, having transitioned from librarians to the desktop, finding it already owned by others. Web portals who have the eyeballs, and the ad model of the day. Software companies pledging to make the customer experience a better one as they seek partners with publishers and aggregators. 

Given the maturation of business models and technologies, and enough dead-ends and sobering realizations to keep expectations more realistic, the suitors are pragmatic. Everyone's trying to figure out how to talk to others on the gym floor, and when and how to mate, and how much it might hurt.

BRIDGING THE CHASM

That's where Content Bridges comes in -- as a translator, a door-opener, a broker, a strategist, in short, a bridger.

Content Bridges provides services to do that, to make useful connections between and among companies building this new world together. Content Bridges offers a spectrum of services, from prospecting, door-opening and three-legged calls to negotiation, contracting, tracking and expanding strategic relationships.

Please check out the new site, as it grows, for services offered, my bio, relevant writings and contact information. I look forward to talking with you.

Ken Doctor