A (distributed) new media column: It's a New Year and a new media. . .will it be richer or poorer?
By Tom Foremski, Silicon Valley Watcher
What an interesting year it has been! 2005 was my first full year as a journalist blogger.
I left the Financial Times in May 2004. Since then, I've been very much poorer monetarily, but a heck of lot richer in experiences and insights.
I never imagined that something like "blogging" could be so significant and mind-changing. I never imagined that writing in this format/medium could be so powerful, in so many ways. I didn't expect that I would speak on so many panels and share the stage with people such as John Chambers of Cisco, Joe Trippi, the foremost political strategist, Dan Scheinman, head of M&A at Cisco and senior media execs from Disney, Electronic Arts, and many other companies.
I feel silly saying this, but I feel that we are all on the cusp of something so huge, it will be mind/life changing for billions of people. Because there is a new media forming and that means this is great time to be a journalist or any media professional.
There really is a new media--this time. And I'm of the Bachman-Turner Overdrive opinion that you ain't seen nothing yet.
You will know the new media
You'll recognize the new media because it won't be like the old. It won't be a printed page, digitally recreated on a web page that looks just like the old page.
Internet 1.0 was about publishing a printed page online. Internet 2.0 allows us to use unique media technologies such as RSS, Flash, AJAX and a host of other tools, to create something which could never be done on print or radio or TV.
A blog post is one very good example of one form of the new media. A blog post is a page of content that is separated from its format (thanks to cascading style sheets) and, very importantly, it carries its own communications (!)
It is a read-and-write document, a totally unique media entity. We have finally connected up the other end of the internet--it's a two-way medium now, with a host of easy, (nearly) one-click publishing tools and very easy media application development tools.
It is a "technology-enabled" world we live in. Technology now takes second place to the application of technology. At last, the cart is before the horse, and that's the way it should be.
Technology-enabled journalists are the future
