Rethinking Content Interaction: Embracing Tomorrow's Tools
Rethinking Content Interaction: Embracing Tomorrow's Tools
If you're a content creator (of any kind – writer, teacher, coach, youtuber; for yourself, or in a company), there are a lot of tools coming out that will enable your audience to engage with your content in a brand new way.
Now is a great time to consider:
How do people currently engage with what I make?
How might that change with these new tools?
How might I lean into changes and make my content easier to access within these new tools?
Here's a couple of examples.
📽️ Chat with YouTube 📽️
The website chatyoutube.com allows you to have a "conversation" with a YouTube video. You drop in the URL of any YouTube video, and you get to start asking questions about the video! This means people can get summaries, or go in and ask things like "what did they say about X topic? I forgot" etc., and the chatbot will pull up an answer.
But how does this work? Well it runs on the transcript of the YouTube video. Which means if you have transcripts turned off, your videos can't be used by services like this.
Of course, you may not want your videos engaged with this way.
Say if you're a teacher, you may want the students to go through the videos by watching, not just skimming the transcript. Or, maybe you want your students to be able to go back and check on answers without fishing through the YouTube video.
So you'll want to consider:
How much control do I need to have over the way my content is consumed?
If I release that control, will I enable more of my audience to successfully engage with my content?
The answers on this could go either way, there's no right or wrong answer - but it is something to consider as the landscape changes.
It also means, if your videos are currently locked up in a closed platform, you'll want to be submitting feature requests to that platform. Because if those platforms don't keep up, your content becomes limited, too.
🧐 AI In Your Local Files 🧐
Bing's sidebar in Edge can analyze pdfs from your hard drive. You pull up your PDF in the browser window, and it can access the content. … I’m still kind of 🤯 about this (and as always, be mindful of what kind of data you’re pulling up if you choose to have Bing give it a lookover).
(It's worth noting that Bing AI searches the doc and gets information from the web. For example, I loaded a partial document. When I asked about content from Chapter 15, it gave great answers! But that chapter’s not present, it was getting it’s info from out on the interwebs. Then I made a PDF of some of my own notes, and it did in fact successfully "read" the document … and then fought me over my opinionated tone. 🤣 Looks like I won’t be one of the ones machines keep around in the event that they take over.)
Almost overnight, Kindle and other book readers are suddenly limited in their capabilities (for now). Because with a PDF, I can open it in the browser, search it using plain language, ask it to cross reference with other content available on the web, explore ideas, draw conclusions, give me counterpoints, etc ... and I can have spelling errors in my questions all along the way and it'll still work. Your audience can't do that with a Kindle book.
Does that mean every book should be released in PDF format? Nope. And it’s not just about Kindle books - the larger point here is about format, what’s accessible to the AI, what isn’t and what will benefit your content the most.
The way we're engaging with content is transforming. If your work or business creates any kind of content, these are just a couple examples of how you can start to reimagine how your audience receives your work, and how you might make your content accessible in different ways.
