You may or may not know this, but Bill Gates is a bit of an environmentalist. His thoughts on the issue make up a large portion of what he posts on his personal blog, The Gates Notes. In his most recent post, however, Gates opted to highlights the ideas of another, reviewing Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken From Nature, a statistic-heavy, academic treatise by author/professor/scientist Vaclav Smil.
While I honestly have little interest in the book, which considers how humanity uses more resources than the planet creates, nor am I especially moved by Gates' thoughts, I am wowed by this review on a technical level. Regardless of your opinion of Gates, no sane person can consider the man lacking progressive vision. Gates' interactive charts, large shifting background images and well-placed video, are all indicative of what can only be described as "next-gen" digital criticism.
Calling Gates' post a review is a bit of a stretch. It's more more of an author profile than a review: Gates spends more time praising Smil and preaching the virtues of his ideas than addressing the book and its parts.
Still, the virtue of what he's done here is undeniable: Using statistics to make prose more engaging is easier said than done, and Gates has done it better than most. In the age of TL:DR, the emphasized quotes and charts makes skimming this article more than slightly informative. Some tech and gaming sites use charts, video, gifs, and other materials to recreate the print sidebar—cramming fun but tangential information for enthralled readers in a digitally-acceptable matter—but Gates uses them to create a second distilled version of the story.
Sure, peeping the quotes and clicking on the charts can't compare to actually reading the article, but that's ok. The breeze-through isn't the exact same story. It's more like a visual-heavy blog post, (you know, a really long tumblr) snippets of connected information that come together to paint a picture around the basic "concept" of the article that you theoretically from reading the first few sentences.
If half of (pre-emptive guffaw) "producing content" is understanding your audience, than this article is among the most enlightened on the internet.
Gates is more interested in getting readers to ingest Smil's information out there more than his own thoughts, and he still he shuffles around choice sentences to make sure you get the idea.
As interesting as it is, I can't help but wonder what would happen if you put those kind of tools in the hands of an expert critic. What if instead of creating two-minute videos summarizing a review's contents, we could turn criticism into multimedia art, telling stories within stories. It makes sense that our 90-second snap judgments should differ from our nuanced 1500-word opinions, even if they arrive at a similar conclusion.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go make some charts for this article about an article.