Content is great, but discoverability is king

Dave Williams, Chief Strategist of 360i, just brought up an old BillG quote from 1996 that “content is king” (speaking of Dave – I tried to find your blog, but no luck!). Content is great, but discoverability is king (see: Google). See where MSN even seems to be going – most of what you hear about today from them are beta’s of new search engines or tools. But content is still exploding online (back in July Technorati was tracking 3MM+ blogs, and last I checked PubSub had 7MM+ sources), and with general information overload becoming even more of an issue, lack of content is just no longer the issue. Finding it all, in a manner that makes sense to you, is it.

Setting up targeted searches on PubSub or Feedster are key to being able to sort through the world of blogs for something relevant. For example, I have PubSub feeds set up for:

“.net academic” - general academic search
“student blogging” – way too many returns, but occasionally I find a link or two
“kevin briody” – like Googling yourself
“microsoft student ambassador” – one of the programs I manage (web site goes up next month)
“msdn student flash” – my official work blog

Lots more, but these are the basics that I scan each day. Which brings me to the point that’s bugging me: everyone talks non-stop about blogs, but blogs are really simply a very easy content publishing engine. RSS (and syndication in general) is what matters. RSS of blogs, site, and search feeds as I outlined, is how people consume all that content in a manner that makes sense to them.

So it doesn’t TRULY matter if your site has a blog (well, commenting is a major reason to have them, but that’s another post), but it had better have syndication (RSS, Atom, RDF, whatever) if you want people to consume your content.

Discoverability + syndication is the key.