In today's digital age content is king. Whether it is blog posts, social media updates, web sites or within enterprises. The content that is created has the power to engage, inform and inspire your audience. Content communicates information, and in today's digital world the range of content is vast from blogs through to video, 3d worlds, spreadsheet and white papers. The more informative and engaging the content, the more likely people will pay attention and take action. Content like any corporate asset has a cost in its production. Its value is unleashed when that content is reused again and again. However, content is locked away in silo’s. These silo’s might be technical silo’s such as wordpress content management site, or a database, or an organisational silo such as sales presentations, or the product teams whitepapers. The web has done much to break down these silos with hyperlinks enabling the easy transition to new pieces of content - however in that transition often the original context is lost, and the rich metadata linked to the content such as the author and permissions are lost in the hyperlink jump.
This content silo problem is keenly felt in enterprises where agility and efficiency are held back because of the level of friction in trying to share content between agile teams. Solutions have evolved such as Slack to embed links to content into conversations, but the content remains in Office 365 or Google Workspace. Similarly creators on the web create content for instagram, or YouTube or TikTok - each platform a silo of content and users, with creators facing an ever increasing content management task rather than focusing on the creation of new content.
LettsCore believes that some of these challenges can be addressed by creating a universal distributed store of content, with a comprehensive content API layer unlocking the content from the application and the silo that created it. By providing a programmable interface to such a content store, it enables creative apps to focus on their creativity, and applications which consume content to easily discover and present relevant content. This separation encourages innovation in how content can be used. As a simple example a video creation suite might create some video content and store this in the LettsCore using the content creation API. A post processing workflow might pull the content and generate short form, and insert advert pre and post roll content creating new variants of the original content. The video platforms such TikTok would select short form content based on its own algorithms, without the creator ever sending the content to TikTok, but LettsCore would manage the rights and permissions based on the original content. This is the media as a service that LettsCore believes is the next generation of content management.
Web 1.0 was characterised by very simple browsers - lacking in Javascript, and servers that served static content. Content was typically delivered from the server file system rather than any content management system. Websites were separate islands with very little sharing of content.
Web 1.0 was a system where few people created content for many viewers, and Web 1.0 was known as the read-only web.
If Web 1.0 was few people creating content for many readers, Web 2.0 became many people creating content for a much larger audience. Web 2.0 saw the emergence of user generated content, social networks and much richer content including imagery and video.
Web 2.0 also focused more extensively on the user experience, with Javascript in the browser, and sophisticated web servers. Content management servers dominated the market separating page structure from content. This enabled user generated content to 'flow' into pages and mobile apps that were, by then, being used.
Content syndication and affiliation exploded as a means of monetising content. However both the content creator and the affiliates sites needed to have a direct commercial relationship.
Web 2.0 has become known as the participative social web. However Web 2.0 has shown a range of challenges including:
Web3 is the emerging next generation internet environment. It is developing around some core technologies.
Blockchain distributed ledgers: Blockchain technologies are developing, providing some key features relevant to the web. Whilst blockchains have gained notoriety around crypto coins, the underlying technology is extremely powerful in delivering a fully distributed ledger around the internet. Tools are developing to enable rapid search and querying of the ledgers. Blockchains allow producers and consumers to interact directly without intermediaries thanks to new developments such as smart contracts.
Blockchains are fully distributed, whereby the complete blockchain is distributed to many servers, enabling blockchains to scale rapidly on a global level.
Alongside the distributed ledger, many blockchain technologies provide a virtual machine, enabling smart contracts to be distributed on the blockchain.
Smart Contracts
Blockchains support smart contracts. Smart contracts can provide a variety of features ranging from defining a royalty payout structure, through to unlocking content. A range of exciting services have developed on the back of blockchain and smart contracts including Non Fungible Tokens (NFT’s). The smart contracts are very flexible allowing a range of functions to be provided.
Inter Planetary File System
The IPFS is a distributed file system built on the back of blockchain. The IPFS provides a fully distributed file system where content is split into many blocks, and pushed around the globe - providing the benefits of a content delivery network for Web3.
LettsCore is designed to be the content management system (CMS) for Web3 built on the core technologies of blockchain, smart contracts and IPFS.
The vision for LettsCore is to become the standard, widely adopted content management system for Web3. Built natively in Web3 technologies, the CMS will be a scalable, secure system, where content is fully attributable, with built in usage control and revenue management services. LettsCore will manage all the different forms of content available, from imagery and video to full multipart documents and 3D assets.
Its design goals include:
To deliver on this vision, LettsCore will develop:
A unique blockchain, designed for content management. The blockchain will be built on existing open source blockchain infrastructure such as Ethereum and Solidity based contracts. The blockchain will have a variety of interfaces for searching and retrieving the required content.
Development of a range of smart contracts applicable to content management, focused on
Content Creator Verification and Reputation management
Rights to use - different models for how the content may be used - eg affiliate, preview etc
Royalty management
Standard API for accessing content
Flexible metadata model.
Integration to IPFS delivering an embedded content delivery system within LettsCore. The LettsCore platform will be designed to support the widest range of content including standard image / video / text / binary file content as well as packages of content such as a set of assets for a web page, or rich 3D experiences.
It is envisioned that multiple platforms will use the LettsCore solution to retrieve and render content including web browsers both desktop and mobile, mobile apps, and the emerging metaverse experiences.
The main use cases for LettsCore will be
Replacement of the web 2.0 headless CMS such as Strapi and Contentful.
Powering social networks providing native social reputation and massive scalability
Providing a content platform for sharing content within media companies and other content rich businesses
Core platform servicing LettsArt, LettsNews and other future LettsGroup ventures and apps.
The content management domain has a number of solutions, some of which are open source such as WordPress, and others are paid for solutions (either SaaS or licensed local installations) such as Contentful. However all of these platforms are based around Web 1 and Web 2 architectures, typically where content resides on a single platform, and is served from this point. Reputation management is either not provided at all, or is provided by the branding / reputation of the website providing the content - e.g. newspaper content sites such as the New York Times. Reputation based on reviews or feedback is fragmented and site centric.
The LettsCore platform is designed to be internet centric rather than site centric - enabling both content and reputation metadata to be distributed across the internet. Whilst there are many other DeFi Web3 applications and platforms, there are few public content platforms. The closest announced competition is dotCMS.com, which is an existing web 2.0 digital experience platform (DXP), and they have published a number of white papers on how a DXP would operate in the Web3 environment. However dotCMS and other web 2.0 platforms will need to maintain backward compatibility for their existing customers, restricting innovation.
LettsCore has the opportunity to become the first from-scratch and pure-breed content management systems for Web3.
LettsNews is a citizen news platform, enabling citizens to report on news events that are impacting them, using their smartphones. As a platform this then enables these news stories to be syndicated to other news and social platforms. Traditionally such a platform would be built on the back of CMS platform such as WordPress or a custom database driven website. The platform would be built and commercial syndication business development partnerships would be put in place to monetize the content. Each syndication would require unique integration and tracking technology to be put in place. The platform would also need to invest heavily in reviewing the user generated content to ensure its appropriateness and validity.
Such a platform built on the LettsCore platform would consist of:
Such an approach benefits LettsNews by providing full smart contract wrap around the content enabling many automated operations such as syndication, content review, author payments and others. The syndication services benefit from having their own distributed copy of the LettsNews news repository for high performance and scale. The citizen journalist benefits from being able to better monetize their work.
Many enterprises generate a great deal of content - sales pitches, budgets, project plans, product specifications and more. These pieces of content sit in shared file systems within an enterprise, often with very little context. Some enterprises have invested heavily in document management systems to attempt to create some order out of this document chaos, however these only increased the level of document silo’s. The overall document management marketing is expected to grow to $10billion by 2026 from $4.5billion in 2021.
LettsCore can make a real difference to this market. Documents along with their meta data such as author, organisational context, purpose etc are stored into the LettsCore blockchain using a smart contract designed specifically for Enterprise document management. These smart contracts when invoked will ‘process’ the document automatically categorising, extracting summaries and reformatting according to the enterprise guidelines. Once stored in the blockchain, automated process can query and process the content in the blockchain to for example:
The combination of the enterprise smart contract and the distributed blockchain enables content to be shared securely outside the boundaries of the enterprise - for example to subsidiaries or partner companies. The smart contract defines the accessibility of all or parts of the content depending on the identity of the viewer. This breaking down of the traditional organizational silo’s becomes extremely important to rapid, productive collaboration.
The potential of providing a common content API within the enterprise will open up new creative uses and workflows for such content enabling an enterprise to become much more agile.
