For example, if you’re a reader, the headline for this post is “Value, Worth, Merit and Intangible Goods.” If you’re Google, the headline is “What Determines the Value of Intangible Goods?” One headline is for humans who are already reading my stuff. The other is for machines to better direct humans to my stuff.

It works. As of this writing, this post has the number one slot in search results for value intangible goods and number seven for intangible goods. Hopefully, I’ve served humans better by considering both the way we think and the way algorithms compute. And I still get to communicate the way I want.

Hmm… you’ve got me thinking the Twitter Tools plugin needs to enable the assignment of still another headline for announcing a post in Twitter!

Thanks for taking the time to respond to my post. I knew this would be a topic on which you would have an opinion.

You are correct in your assertion that the post was as much about figuring out my own thoughts on the subject as much as it was about hearing what others thought. I did want to generate some conversation, because I find the evolution of media and how it affects our behavior endlessly fascinating. The changes we make to adapt existing content to current and future technologies is sometimes amazing, sometimes horrifying, but always interesting.

For example, in the future, you’ll almost never see headlines like “Hix Nix Stix Pix” on news stories coming from major media outlets. Clever headlines were meant to catch the eye when browsing the newsstand, which was a reasonably finite amount of data. The only search engine you needed were your eyeballs. Since the world’s journalists are now competing for the first page of Google, the nature and content of the headlines must change. They tend to be more factual, simpler, and to the point so that they are more relevant to the terms people use when searching.

And yet, if you saw that same headline on Twitter, it might catch your eye as it meant to. Google is search, Twitter is discovery, just as browsing the newsstand was once discovery. What is old is new once more.

*ahem* This is rambling, so I’ll cut it off here. You’ve given me much to think about. Clearly, I’m still churning out ideas on the topic, so I’ll likely have another essay soon to further the discussion.

-Chris

As for paying different amounts for tangible and intangible media… I know that (usually) the creator stands to make more from the intangible item even if it’s priced much lower than the tangible one because of all the other costs involved with the tangible… so I prefer to charge less, and like to pay less, too. :-)