Merchandizing Content

Interesting idea from John Blossom at Shore Communications, a research company like Outsell that tracks and analyzes trends in content. Blossom used to work at Outsell, and I like him because he said nice things about the Environmental Scan in an email to me. ;-)

"Content providers of all kinds need to think carefully about how merchandizing concepts that have been so valuable in ecommerce can pump up content usage by users who value ecommerce methods in their daily lives...Even when an item comes out on top on a search results page it's important to place it in the framework of other related content that's going to give it a rich framework for interpretation and use. Reference data, premium content, directories and other kinds of related content can help one to make more informed decisions right on the spot without having to go into further searches."

This is, to me, a different way of saying what we said in the Scan: that it is not enough to deliver just content anymore, that context must somehow come with content. Visualization software is one way of presenting context although it's early days for this as a metasearch tool for library content--needs more on-the-fly personalization, IMO. Maybe some combo of visual search techniques with Amazon-like "if you value this, you'll value that" features.