Three very good reads at the cusp of content and technology. I quite enjoyed reading them.

Don’t Try to Be a Publisher and a Platform at the Same Time – a beautifully insightful piece from HBR. it just cleared up a lot of little muddled bubbles in the head. Generally speaking, content people are in awe of technology and don’t think they know how to get around it; and technology people have the converse problem. Maybe the solution is collaboration, rather than being conjoint.

Jonathan Glick coined the ungainly word “platisher” to describe hybrids of digital media platforms and publishers. When a media company attempts to be both a destination for edited, themed content and a tool others can use to create content, it’s a platisher. ……

In the end, the dichotomy between publisher and platform is actually a difference in goals. The question is not: “Are you a platform or a publisher?” The question is: “Do you care more about scale, or about editorial voice?”

Editorial voice, is my response. But, for someone else it may be scale. having the two in the same ecosystem can be traumatic.

Here’s why the traditional TV network might become totally obsolete – and what could replace it :

It isn’t that we are consuming less video content, it is just that we are consuming it less in a linear fashion. Video is alive. Traditional TV is entering the phase that print encountered 20 years ago. If they are smart – and most are myopic about their today – it will be the same players who occupy the poll position a decade from now. But, it seems unlikely. Traditional media is so obsessed with today, that they lose sight of the fact that today gets over, and there is a tomorrow.

In a recent report on the future of media, Barclays analysts argued that as “aggregation” platforms become the primary driver of eyeballs – think Netflix, or even a “Netflix of Netflixs” – the idea of a channel doesn’t make much sense anymore.

This.cm wants to deliver the only links you’ll really read each evening : again a fascianting read, about how some publishers are going against conventional wisdom, to do something completely different. On the internet, mostly, less is more.

the evening email delivered to This.cm users who have registered and are “following” other users — whether favorite writers or publications — will highlight links to stories shared by the people/publications users follow. At the moment, these are the most recent things shared in a user’s network that day……Users will still receive five links picked by a This.cm editor, though they can opt to receive only the five handpicked links, five links from followers, or both.