Introducing LightWeave: Intelligent Content for Everyone

Today, creators have potential like never before—to create massive value and share it with the entire world. But that potential comes with an equally massive challenge: to reach their full audience and create a sustainable business, creators need to publish and maintain large, high-quality portfolios of content, across multiple formats and channels.

The solution is intelligent content—an approach that empowers creators to make, reuse, adapt, distribute, and update consistent, high-quality content at scale. In the past, intelligent content has been used mainly by large businesses, because the tools require financial and technical investments that smaller creators can’t afford. We want to change that. And that’s why we’re building LightWeave: software to allow anyone—and everyone—to create intelligent content.

The Potential: Unlocking Massive Creative Value

If you are a creator—or thinking of becoming one—you now have potential like never before. Working from home, by yourself, you can create something of value and share it with the entire world. Thousands or even millions of people can benefit from your ideas, your skills, your experiences, your joys, your fears, your successes, and even your failures.

In short, you can create something that matters.

And you can even get paid for what you’ve created, so that you can afford to create more. You can transform your content creation into a positive feedback loop, in which you get more for what you create, which allows you to create more, which means you get more for what you create, and so on. You can turn content creation into your full time job, and maybe even your own company, building a team to support you in the more tedious aspects of the job so you can focus on what you love most: creating.

The Problem: Tedious, Manual Work

That’s the potential. The reality is more complex. If you want to truly realize your potential as a creator, you’ll quickly run into a mountain of advice on all the things you “should” be doing. Here are just a few of the “shoulds” creators hear all the time:

You should be on multiple platforms so you can reach your audience, wherever they are
You should repurpose your content into multiple formats—blog posts, short form videos, and more
You should keep your content fresh and up-to-date
You should defend your content against copyright violations, to ensure you get credit and revenue for what you create

For an individual creator—especially one who has competing priorities from work or family (in other words, this whole life thing)—following through on all these “shoulds” can become overwhelming. You might manage to fit content creation into your busy schedule by getting up extra early, or working extra late, or spending your weekends on it. But scaling things up to a point where you’re actually reaching the entire audience that matters to you, and making enough money on your content to scale back or quit your day job, can feel like an impossible task.

The problem is that a large amount of this work is still being done manually. You find yourself manually copying, pasting, importing, exporting, publishing, and updating across dozens of apps and platforms.

You should not have to do this.

The only thing you should have to do, as a creator, is create.

The Solution: Intelligent Content

How do you do that? We believe a key part of the solution is something called intelligent content.

Intelligent content is, essentially, content that is divided up into discrete pieces (or modules), where each piece of content comes along with metadata—extra data about what that piece of content means. And this metadata makes the content something that your computer can understand. In contrast, standard content is understandable by humans (but not computers).

For example, suppose that you have a logo that you use in all your content, and one day you decide that you want to change it. You, as a human, can look at your videos, blog posts, website, and social media, and easily see all the places in which your logo has been used. Having this understanding of your content allows you to—manually and tediously—copy and paste the new logo into all the hundreds or thousands of places it needs to go.

With intelligent content, your computer can have the same understanding. With intelligent content, your logo can be stored in a central location and tagged with metadata that tells the computer about the identity and intent of that piece of content. If you then change the logo in this single, central location, the computer can automatically update it in all of the other places where it exists.

And that’s just a simple task: updating a logo. By making your content both human readable and machine readable, you unlock a long list of powerful benefits. For example, intelligent content can be:

Multi-format – Create for multiple formats and platforms simultaneously
Reusable – Reuse the same piece of content across many locations, so that any number of updates can be managed from a single, central location
Discoverable – Discover existing content more easily, reducing the tendency to recreate what already exists
Personalizable and adaptable – Repurpose, adapt, and personalize content for different contexts and audiences
Higher in quality and more consistent – Increase the consistency and quality of your content (but without working any harder)
Interactive – Make interactive content that responds dynamically to user input
Traceable – Track the authorship of your content (its provenance) to support you in getting the credit (and revenue) you deserve for your work
Collaborative – Distribute and crowdsource content creation, facilitating modular collaboration at any scale
Localizable – Localize content efficiently, by reusing modules and translating only new or updated content.
Future proof – Future-proof your content by building in modules, where outdated pieces can be easily swapped out without having to recreate the rest of the content
Measurable – Get better analytics and insights from modular, structured content

With all these potential benefits, it’s reasonable to ask: Why isn’t everyone already building intelligent content? Intelligent content isn’t new—the concept has been around for decades. If it is so powerful, why aren’t all creators making their content this way? The answer is that there simply haven’t been the right tools for it. Essentially all of the intelligent content tools that exist today are targeted at big businesses that have massive needs for it—and comparably massive resources to invest in developing it. Individual creators and smaller businesses have not been able to break into intelligent content because the costs—in time, money, and technical expertise—are simply too high.

LightWeave: Intelligent Content for Everyone

We believe the time is right to change this. Why now? Two reasons:

Everybody now has a large need for intelligent content. Today, small companies and individual creators have a stronger-than-ever need for intelligent content. They now have the potential to connect with their audiences like never before—but this potential comes along with a need to create and maintain their content at an unprecedented scale (on multiple formats, multiple platforms, etc.).
The up-front investment costs can be dramatically reduced. We believe that it’s now entirely possible to build intelligent content without having to invest massive amounts of money or hire big technical teams. This is the challenge that we are taking on: Making tools that have an intuitive, non-technical workflow, but still yield all the key benefits of Intelligent Content.

So that’s what we’re all about: Making software that allows anyone—and everyone—to create intelligent content, using an intuitive, creative workflow.

We need your help.

We believe in a better future for content and content creators. That’s why we’re building a new technology, LightWeave, to make it easier for everyone to create intelligent content. We believe in building this technology in cooperation with the community and we deeply value our conversations together.

If you’re interested in learning more about intelligent content, and would like to join our user community, click the blue button to get more information.

LightWeave