OPEN

Thought for the day from Wednesday’s NMK Forum was from web consultant and genius-at-large  Umair Haque who invoked the phrase:

Context is king.

A nice riposte to the tired web media adage that content is king. Content’s not unimportant, but context is much more key to understanding the evolution of media at the present time.

As I pointed out at NMK, that’s why search engines marketing – putting the spammier SEO side aside – can teach the rest of marketing so much. You are only successful in being found or your ad being clicked on if your content and services are in the right context – most often an individual’s desire to find information about a given subject.

That’s where so much of media and marketing is missing the mark at present. To understand context you have to understand networks. Your networks and where you sit in them. Where the people who are important to you are there.

Want to see how much content is king? Take a look at the top news stories on Google News. Hundreds of authoritative, reliable news sources all hashing over the same story.

: : In a side conversation, responding to an assertion that there was too much fat in the traditional news media by Jason McCabe Calacanis, Guardian blogs editor Kevin Anderson painted another image of where there was over-supply in traditional media as the – as Tony Blair would have it – “feral” pack chases “impact”:

1400 journalists attending the execution of the Oaklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh. When 50 anti-death penalty presenters turned up they were surrounded by a three deep ring of cameramen and hacks. One of the protestors had an anxiety effect due to their claustrophobia.

: : : The above image is from Jyri founder of the Jaiku microblogging platform – which I’m actually likeing a lot more than Twitter at the moment. Here are the slides to his brilliant presentation:

: : : : Updated: Oh one more thing I’ loved at NMK was the phrase “my hotmail friends”, describing someone’s less advanced contacts in their personal network.