Convergence of content

The idea of content converging from off to online is not as remote as you might think to our fair land of Romania. The taking of offline content and reshaping it for online happens quite often with TV stations (protv, tvr1) who have had the luck to have onboard some decent online people.

It happens also with newspapers, with more success for Gazeta Sporturilor, a sports newspaper which has learned that it is not enough to place your offline articles online but treats its www version as a separate product.

What I have found interesting recently, especially while browsing Republik, a youth magazine, is the complementariness of offline and online in some cases. I found myself unable to read the magazine without having to log on every two or three pages to look for stuff online. There were literally tens of instances where the story in the magazine was incomplete without an online reference or where they simply told you, find this out by logging on to ...

I think that it is an interesting play upon the divide offline/online where offline content is trying to act like digital text by "linking" to online content. And by doing that it is also, slowly, adopting some of the other characteristics of hypertext meaning that it does not link only to itself (or its correspondent mother URL) but to other sources, virtually creating a universe of connected sources which provide a complete picture.

What you might be lacking is the speed of links but ultimately the result is the same. You merge your online and offline experiences to get the full story. And what is more exciting about this is that we are growing a generation which does not mind doing it because they have learned to piece things together. So, pretty much transmedia rulz :-)