18
August
2005
|
23:00 PM
America/Los_Angeles

The coming era of the media engineer and media entrepreneur

. . . software engineer era ending


By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

Link_Harvester.jpgThere are tens of millions of programmers entering the world's job markets annually. Paradoxically, this global expansion of the geek population means the end of the era of the software engineer/coder as the most important profession in Silicon Valley - and in other centers of innovation.


Why? Because it is a common commodity. Software, servers and algorithms are cheap and are going to get cheaper. That's why Internet 2.0, this next phase of the internet (lower-case "i" please) will become the era of the "media engineer" - tech-savvy content producers, including journalists.


There are very few of them and the global pool grows slowly. [It's easier teaching geek to creative people than the other way around.]


It's all about the content

Google, for example, uses servers and software and algorithms to produce content - they publish pages of machine-harvested links. Yes, it's not easy to do well, but it's not that difficult for others to do reasonably well.


What counts, at the end of the day, is that Google's links have to point to something of value, to content that has not been machine-harvested or machine-aggregated. Producing content such as news stories, features, and reviews, is not cheap. It is produced by media professionals, not machines. And increasingly, it will be produced by tech-savvy media professionals.


That is why finally, content will be king, imho. (I bought ContentWillBeKing.com about a year ago!)


This is now the era of the media engineer and media entrepreneur because the future is all about technology-enabled media companies.


[Oh, and BTW, every future company is a technology-enabled media company :-). . .]


Also see: Journalists need to learn to speak some geek