Whoever uses the word "content" betray his bias as a commercial publisher.
Take a look at the original web site:
http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
That's clearly a non-interactive (aside from navigation) one-to-many system. What is that if not "content"?
Think of a personal site. What is that, if not communication about oneself? And once you blog on that site or publish essays [1], the line between a publishing / communication medium heavily blurs. There's nothing inherent about the web that says it must be one thing or the other — it's how people have and continue to use it.
There's also a lot to be said about the "fun" of creating things on a global communication platform. Many free tools like YouTube, Instagram, or Twitter are popular because they let the average person utilize the same power of the web we've always had. Some people monetize what they create on those platforms; others use it to communicate; commercial entities create "content" on it; and yet more people use it just for fun. It's all about how you use the medium.
"Content" is to a large extend marketing shorthand for "text which improves our conversion funnel or sells CPM slots by being well optimised for search queries and/or social clicks". Which certainly wasn't the intention of the original web either.
Journalists, authors, researchers and people blogging for the joy of blogging generally don't refer to their output as "content", and do think their work is primarily intended to communicate, albeit mostly in one-to-many fashion.
Of course regardless of how idealistic their intentions, most journalists have always produced much of their output for publications whose management teams largely consider it as something to wrap ads around, but that approach is far more pervasive and metrics-driven on the modern web.
I guess that's the disconnect. I see that some people use it that way, but to me it's far more broad than that. I would certainly refer to blogs and other such things as "content" too.
Consider NSBlog, a fantastic blog full of interesting and useful information for programming for OS X and iOS. I don't think of my blog as a content source, but I do think of NSBlog as one.
I wonder under what conditions mikeash thinks of his blog as "content" — as far as I remember, the only time I think of my blog/website as content is when I'm looking at the whole thing and thinking "Man, there's not much here. I should write more often." However, when I'm writing something that goes on it, I don't think of myself as "producing content", I think of what I'm doing as _writing_.
Maybe people call things "content" only when they're sufficiently removed from the specifics of what is being written/filmed/drawn?
Maybe it's just generality versus specificity. My blog has "programming articles," your blog has "writing," blogs in general have "content" (they might have images or video or who knows what). And just like you wouldn't say "objects" when you could say "people," maybe I wouldn't say "content" when I could say "articles."
And now these words have lost whatever little meaning they had to me!
Is that a reqirement for "communication"? Email is often non-realtime, many-to-many. No one would claim that disqualifies it from being "communication".
Right now, we're communicating, sure. But a book like Eloquent Javascript (http://eloquentjavascript.net/) isn't content?
The postal system is a communication medium, but you can still buy mail (magazines, for example). I don't see why this is a problem.
GOML