Nobody Wants to Read Your Stuff

Nobody wants to read your stuff.

Writing is about the reader - the infinitely busy reader who has a thousand things to do & three goals to accomplish by the end of the quarter. What will attract the reader? What sentence will propel them to the next phrase to the end?

In the past, great content marketers have segmented readers into personas, written witty hooks to entice visitors to dwell.

But the Internet is changing. Machines will read most written content, summarizing on behalf of the reader - the reader who has a question & wants to marshal the collective intelligence on the web into a personalized answer.

Websites like this one need to change. We need llms.txt, a markdown version of this page, easily digestible by Gemini or Claude or ChatGPT - & content summary pages that provide aggregated digestible summaries for crawlers to understand where to find the right content to answer a query.

To that end, on the home page there is now an “Ask Me to Generate a Blog Post” box. You can type in a topic & an AI will generate a blog post for you with all of the knowledge contained in this blog.

The experiment is a work-in-progress & far from perfect.

But I very much believe in this direction that content will be generated at query time based on all of the knowledge of a content producer & the query in the mind of person asking a question.

Sometimes this will happen on the website itself and other times it will happen using an AI.

Of course, there will also be passive reading, it will be largely aggregated by AI & very few people’s voices are both consistently insightful & unique enough to warrant a direct line in a particular voice on a daily topic to abroad audience.

Time to prepare for that future.