Kevin Kelly recently wrote a superb commentary on what adds value to digital content, called "Better Than Free." Free content is everywhere, so what compels, and will compel, people to pay for it? He names eight "content generatives" that make content worth something -- a generative defined as something that must be generated, grown, cultivated, and nurtured with the content itself.

What struck me about these generatives is that they read like a list of content technology project goals, and they're words we hear in WCM and Portal vendor sales pitches all the time. They're tailoring their technology to achieve these things, in an attempt to add value to content. To name a few:

1. Immediacy & Personalization: As readers of The Web CMS Report and the Enterprise Portals Report know, we evaluate the content distribution and personalization features of many tools. Maybe most content isn't worth paying for, but getting content delivered to you, in a personalized manner, makes it far more valuable.
2. Interpretation: If open source software is free, why are there so many open source guys with lots of money? Because their interpretation of how to work with that software is worth a lot. Our own business at CMS Watch depends in large measure on interpretive value.
3. Authenticity: Anything can be copied these days, and people are duped all the time. My colleague Alan Pelz-Sharpe collects rare photography, I collect old maps. Knowing how to judge a real from a fake is vital for any tangible asset. I would have no idea how to identify a particular photograph's authenticity. Knowledge of what makes something authentic isn't always easy to come by. So it will be in the digital world as well, and you'll have to pay to be sure.
4. Findability: Perhaps the generative near and dearest to my heart. As readers of the Enterprise Search Report know, no search technology can compensate for poor content hygiene, and in most cases, metadata doesn't travel with an asset, rather, it's often just associated with it and stored in a system, useless if that asset ends up somewhere else. Adobe's XMP, which allows meta data to travel with a digital asset, makes that asset more valuable and findable, regardless of where it ends up.

In fact, metadata is key to all of Kelly's generatives. In some ways, the generatives could be seen as key goals for implementers of content technology. After all, it's not just about managing content, it's about making it worth something.