Content – an illustrated history

UPDATE 1: Thank you to Wired, Mashable, @dmscott, @guykawaski and everyone else who has posted and shared our illustration :-)

UPDATE 2: Now available in Slideshare format.

UPDATE 3: Now available in for printing or anything else you fancy.

UPDATE 4: Now available in Spanish. Thanks to @FollowFlock & @rulsCC.

UPDATE 5: Taptu CEO Mitch Lazar loves our style (and the Taptu reference no doubt!) so we agreed earlier this week to apply our illustrative style to Taptu's brand communications going forward. Cool.

UPDATE 6: The Slideshare format made the number 1 slot on Slideshare's homepage for part of the day on the 27th Jan, and accrued over 4,000 views in 48 hours.

UPDATE 7: August 2011. Now available as a YouTube video. Don't know why we didn't think of it earlier! Embedded below.

No-one with a smattering of social Web literacy can fail to marvel at what's taken place in recent history. The rate of change has been unprecedented.

Who would have thought thirty years ago that the Internet would go mainstream and the World Wide Web would transform content business models (and many other business models come to that) so radically?

Who would have thought twenty years ago that the average Joe would carry handheld devices as powerful as the Apple and Android devices?

Who would have thought ten years ago that consumers of media content could also, just as easily, be producers of media content?

Who would have thought five years ago that each and everyone of us could, with a stroke of a touch screen, design their own content channel and publish it.

I am fascinated with the history of media and content, its present and its future, and being a communicator I wanted to share my awe in a way that would prompt others to share it with their friends and family. So I joined forces with Nic Hinton (@karoshikula), an outstanding illustrator, to design "Content – an illustrated history".

I work with a social and media technology company that has developed a social news aggregator, My Taptu, so you'll forgive me if I have positioned this beautiful little app to represent the best of the present day – but that's because it does :-)

Lastly, please feel free to share this in anyway you like in line with the creative commons license, but if you have a high-volume website I'd appreciate it if you downloaded a copy to your own server rather than kill mine! (Right click to save the image.) Thanks.

Content: An illustrated history by Sheldrake & Karoshikula is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The video

http://youtu.be/wp2eUSL4oHc