By Hilda Gutierrez
This site is aimed at a public which enjoys reading. Reading material
from all types of books (books can be purchased at contentville as
you search and find them) to magazines (a subscription to a magazine
can also be established then and there), screenplays (can also be
bought then and there), e-books (books in online form that can be
downloaded for a very small fee) to legal documents (like court cases
that can also be downloaded for a very small fee), pretty much anything
that has some kind of text or rather any type of readable/viewable
content. At first glance, the site seems to achieve a very comfortable
level of an online community. Because everyone who will visit the
site is interested in basically reading, there is a sense that when
you visit the site, you touch and connect on some level to the interests
of others. As the opening phrase suggests, "Readers Rejoice",
this is a place where readers of all types can get the information
they want, when they want it. A lot of attention is placed on making
the visitor/user feel welcome, at least that's the feel I got. I felt
like anything I had the urge to look for I would find, which I did
(cooking, modern art, photography, aliens, religion...). The site
is extremely user friendly which establishes a very solid and important
give-and-take relationship between the visitor/user and the interactivity
of the site.
In regards to how this site relates to the transformation of news,
there is a lot to talk about. News will always have some kind of content,
content may or may not have news, either way getting such news and/or
content across to an audience takes a certain skill for it to be effective,
moving, or able to provoke some kind of interest on the subject to
an audience. Contentville does this very effectively, all the news
and content that you could ever be interested in, contentville acts
as a vessel to bring it all together for you, and it is done in a
way that is not overwhelming, non-intrusive, simple to manage and
comfortable. Because there is such a vast variety of interests in
terms of what content or news people are interested in, it's difficult
to have an effective site that keeps the attention of a specific focus
group. Because the focus group that contentville is aimed at is readers
in general, the task is more easily managed in terms of maintaining
an interested audience. Their audience can very well be anyone from
students, parents, teachers, doctors, lawyers, journalists, politicians,
etc.
I never knew this site existed but after looking through it, I am
positive I will be using it in the future. An interesting thing that
I noticed, the graphic for contentville looks sort of like a street
sign, and in a way the site itself is an intersection or meeting place
between readers and their interests as readers and the content that
this site offers, which at least for me offers some reassurance that
such intersection exists.