Tuesday, January 05, 2010

The new News habitat

Before you start reading, you might want to check out these two excellent posts: from Dan Conover here, and from Clay Shirky here.

I'm watching History Channel's "Monster Dinosaurs". A change in habitat is bad for the prevailing or perfectly adapted animals; extinctions are akin to throwing the dice in evolution, it may or may not give forth better species in the new environment.


The Internet's world wide web

Let's analize the new environment.

The Internet extends its reach quite a bit, to the www, or worldwide, to the far reaches of the web's network. As a consequence, optimal content should have universal appeal (i.e. Google search, Facebook, Wikipedia).

Publication is immediate and storage —or hosting— costs are close to nil. Breaking news and large archives can take good advantage of the immediacy and database features of sorting, retrieval and linking (i.e. Wikipedia, Google books, Facebook).

Articles, fields within a database, may include text, sound, images and videos. Since more senses are involved, videos should be the preferred communication media (i.e. YouTube).


It's a two-way street, communication can go both ways. The more content from users, the better —it's cheaper. (i.e. Facebook, Wikipedia, MySpace).






Let's try to propose a publication model that takes advantage of these features.

But before we go on, we have to grasp a major Internet limitation —it's computer based. To put it bluntly, it's like pinching a mirror, not much satisfaction in the smell and touch sensory areas; and worse, reading stresses our eyes, quite a bit more than print on paper.



A good example is worth a thousand words...

I found content that works a near perfect example. It develops web page content from thin slices of news: Bridal's Guide, Your Garden, Body & More, Home Style, Car Guide... It extends its reach to readers from a variety of publications through syndicating their service. It's not perfect... it lacks user content derived advantages, and no feed into print.

Beetles are incredible... Far more interesting than dinosaurs.

Love to hear from you.

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