In my admittedly impenetrable post on “The Truth about Content”, content occupies the most mercurial role among the players. Data, information and knowledge are connected through an escalating process of “meaningful organization”. But content is a slightly different animal. My pyramid illustration tries, but only tries, to convey that content in fact has a touch point at each level – the data it envelops, the information is produces and the knowledge that emerges amid the connections amongst our information exchanges.

I think the line from my sprawling post that comes closes to aligning with your practical definition (although in itself it’s not that practical) follows:

“More recently, I have come to think of content as an abstraction layer that separates data representations from information transactions – the layer [content] in which we, as the content owners and information actors, plan the many different ways in which we may want to engage audiences and to lay out our resources and processes accordingly.” This is basically where the “connecting with content” post starts.

As you say, this sounds like matter for our next encounter.

Oh yes, one last thing. Having been a “hard-core post-structuralist” in my murky past, I find that any reference to Saussure, Lacan or Derrida is enough to make me shed all pretext of brevity. As you can imagine what this means, I am working hard to resist temptation…for all our sakes…

Someone just pointed me to this article: http://www.changeminds.org/explanations/critical_theory/concepts/signifier_signified.htm which explains the signifier and the signified, according to Saussure’s theory of the sign, where these are a matched pair that, together, The author’s statement “A signifier without the signified is noise.” To say that content is “whatever carries meaning” loops back to my statement that content is contextualized data. But at the risk of sounding like I’m going in circles, if information relied on “matching contexts”, then multiple contexts implies a quantity of content.

I could come at this question from another couple of angles, but will save that effort for my book and, next time we bump into one another at an event, for discussion over a cold one.

And this is very true of our industry (notice how I have blithely grouped us all into one community) and “content” is clearly the root concept around which we do need more clarity if we wish to make more practical progress. In this quest, it is interesting how the pursuit of a common definition of content often gets derailed. I myself was confronted by one colleague who challenged one of my definitions for “content” with the comment that it was indistinguishable from what is commonly meant by “information”. Now this intervener did hail from the extreme end of the technolophilia spectrum, so there was no small amount of Claude Shannon at work here, but the charge caused me to revisit my own rubric.

Rahel, I really like the gritty practicality and simplicity of your definition for content. I like in particular the framing of the definition amid the picture of someone considering the context of content being designed / created and the myriad contexts of its various consumers. In one presentation a couple of years ago, on the not too distant topic of “Finding Information”, I said that the problem – on multiple levels with one of these sadly being computational – is one of “matching contexts”. You have corroborated my supposition but done so in a much more grounded, and practical, way.

I have a recent series of posts on these very topics (see jgollner.typepad.com) and in several of them I come at the specific challenge of distinguishing content from information. These explorations would not yet qualify for the moniker of practical.

This reminds me of the classic ascending scale of Data > Information > Knowledge.

I think your focus is implicitly drawing attention to the circumstance of consumption. When people go online (or where ever) to access something to read, watch or experience in whatever way; are not consuming 1s and 0s, they are always engaging something that has “meaning”. Meaning and context are co-temporal. The ambiguous stuff of the universe (data, matter) becomes experienced meaningfully within contexts. No context, no meaning, no significance, no qualities.

One way that I clarify the issue of content for the online space, is when I draw the distinction between content and utility.

The bulk of what shapes information and communication technologies products, is “content” (what is accessed, consumed, managed, manipulated, created, shared) and “utility” the interface and back-end infrastructure that accesses, delivers, manages, manipulates, creates and shared.

The one limitation I see with limiting content to context (at least in the “meaningfulness” sense that I think is implicit in your definition) is that a person does not need to be meaningfully engaging content in order to do things like collect and manage it. In the collection and management process, content can be data, and information and so forth.

Your content here gives this more meaning in our industry – and context!