Top 5 content platforms

I want to tell you about the evolution of content platforms, from clay tablets to digital tablets.

Let me take you back to around 700 BC, to ancient Persia, and one of the greatest libraries ever built – the library of the scholar king Ashurbanipal.

In his library he had amassed over 40,000 separate works of knowledge, taken as prizes from the kingdoms he conquered. It was almost certainly only accessible to himself, his royal household, and perhaps a few select priests and scribes.

The works were stored on one of the simplest, yet most effective, platforms ever invented.

Clay.

Difficult to hold above your head in bed

This is the iPad of the Bronze Age.

A clay tablet was ingenious. It was cheap to produce, easily marked, and once hardened it was extremely resilient to compression and decay. The tablets could be stacked in columns or rows, allowing thousands to be crammed in to a small space.

But there was a big problem with this new technology. It had no network, and the content rights were closely guarded (quite literally – by big guards with heavy bronze swords and big taches).

King Ashurbanipal had succeeded in a huge act of coordinated theft, gathering together humanity’s communal knowledge under one roof and making sure he was the only reader.

Luckily, there was another platform that was around at the same time, which eventually superseded this first stage of platform evolution…

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