Long form on the Web is “not working”

But I actu­ally think stock and flow is the mas­ter metaphor for media today. Here’s what I mean:

• Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind peo­ple that you exist.
• Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the con­tent you pro­duce that’s as inter­est­ing in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what peo­ple dis­cover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, build­ing fans over time.

I feel like flow is ascen­dant these days, for obvi­ous reasons—but we neglect stock at our own peril.

via Robin Sloan, Stock and flow « Snarkmarket.

I feel like the attempts to manage the firehose is just more of the same thing: technology being used to solve a mess that technology got us in in the first place. As a result, the real appeal of content and the human elements of creating, composing and lovingly arranging content are going out the window.

I need to be able to lean on people I trust and respect to better present information for me. I don’t want a “stream” or a “river” of anything. I want to stop drowning and I want quality to win over quantity.

via Rich Ziade, Scatter/Gather: a Razorfish blog about content strategy, pop culture and human behavior.