How Blockchain Can Impact Content Management
The term blockchain is often associated with Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, but they are not the same. Blockchain can be defined as “a decentralized, distributed and public digital ledger that is used to record transactions across many computers so that any involved record cannot be altered retroactively, without the alteration of all subsequent blocks”.
Decentralized means there is not a central authority with a large server or set of servers that stores all the transactions. Records are encrypted and distributed across multiple servers in a secure way. The benefit of this approach is that you are not trusting information that comes from a central authority, instead, you are trusting information that comes from multiple resources.
Blockchain and Content Management
A key aspect is that blockchain is considered a digital ledger used to store transactions. If we analyze this more in detail, the first relationship between content and blockchain comes into view. What if we could use blockchain to track how our content (text, images, videos, etc.) is shared on the internet and how it is used? This could help to get a better understanding of how our content is used from a marketing perspective by learning how effective it is and who the final target audience is. Also, you could track content from a legal perspective, to determine if it’s being used by any third party without author permissions.
Another relationship between content and blockchain is the ability to keep a history of who has made changes to the content, when and what was changed. For example, if your company works with translations, you may be interested in tracking the changes of your translated content or your translation memory. This feature could allow you to understand how content changed before it reached its final status and, even better, it could allow you to go back to previous versions without limitations.
Finally, blockchain can allow you to determine if content is reliable or not. As mentioned before, blockchain allows tracing content and this could help to determine if content is from a trustworthy source or not. This is probably one of the most interesting use cases, as there have been many issues related to fake news and internet users are more concerned than ever before about the reliability of information.
Summary
In conclusion, we can say that blockchain is a radical concept and, for sure, it will evolve and provide solutions for many different aspects of our lives. Content management is not the exception, and it will require platforms to incorporate blockchain concepts to satisfy new users’ demands.
