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Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: Democratization of News Media

Written by Richard MacManus / November 18, 2009 2:34 AM / 3 Comments

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It's November 2009 and we're nearing the end of a decade. It's been a tumultuous time of change for many industries, much of it driven by the Internet. The newspaper industry has been particularly affected by the Web. Over the past 10 years, news media has undergone a seachange akin to the invention of the printing press in 1440.

Just as Johannes Gutenberg's printing press brought books to the mainstream public in the 15th century, Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web brought commercial publishing to the people.

The Web has always been a medium where people could just as easily write as read (yes, the read/write Web), however it didn't reach its potential until blogging came along earlier this decade.

Blogging

Blogging not only allowed anybody to publish easily to the Web, it ended up shaking up the print media world.

Blogging began in the 90s as a form of online diary - Rebecca Blood wrote a good pre-history in 2000. One of the early popular blogging services was Blogger.com, launched by Evan Williams (who subsequently became a co-founder of Twitter) and Meg Hourihan in August 1999. The service was acquired by Google in February 2003, a couple of months before ReadWriteWeb began. At that point, 2003, blogging was still seen as an informal diary-type of publishing.

Around 2004-05, blogging started to become accepted as a legitimate news source. This was around the time that ReadWriteWeb began to publish tech news, as well as analysis.

By the end of the decade, many blogs were directly challenging newspapers - proving that a solid news brand, such as Huffington Post, can be created from almost nothing in a few years.

RSS

Blogging software was one part of the democratization of media. RSS ("Really Simple Syndication") was another. There were and still are different versions of RSS, created by Dave Winer and others. But whatever the flavor, syndication has had a major impact on media.

Basically RSS allowed people to subscribe to updates from blogs and other publications. Using RSS Aggregators, people could read news from a selection of niche and general news publications.

Blogs were the first to utilize RSS, but mainstream media followed during the 2005-06 period. Today it is very rare for a major news website - whether it be the New York Times or a leading blog - not to use RSS.

Twitter & The Real-Time Web

The next major development in news media occurred towards the end of this decade. It was of course Twitter and the Real-Time Web.

To be fair, this has challenged not only traditional media - but blogs as well. Now anyone, whether they're a writer or not, can publish 140 characters to the Web. And it might end up as breaking news, as the Hudsen River plane crash proved earlier this year.

Media in the Next Decade

There is much talk of the mainstream media "dying" and blogs usurping traditional media companies like the New York Times. While it's true that blogs sometimes report breaking news stories or analyze them better than newspaper websites, I'm a big believer in the power of brand. Washington Post, Wall St Journal, New York Times - these are all powerful brands and they reach a much wider audience than the vast majority of blogs.

The challenge of course for mainstream media is to (drastically) reduce their costs, because few people want to pay for content these days - news or otherwise.

However, in my view the traditional news media industry is in much less danger of extinction than the music industry. Musicians can bypass record labels completely nowadays, but there will always be a need for news to be questioned, put in context and analyzed. The best media publications of the next 10 years will do that and be successful, the ones that don't will fade away.

See also: Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: Online Music

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1. Innovation for both traditional and the new democratized media in the next decade is less about driving traffic to a destination site and more about how the original source benefits (i.e., makes money) from their content as it's distributed and re-aggregated across the web.

    Posted by: jeffjaner

   | November 18, 2009 3:48 AM

Brillant. Simple, complete, smart and short. I agree with your concepts and selection of highlights.

Posted by: Fernando Arocena | November 18, 2009 3:52 AM

Interesting post. But I beg to differ on your assertion that "By the end of the decade, many blogs were directly challenging newspapers - proving that a solid news brand, such as Huffington Post, can be created from almost nothing in a few years."

Is the Huffington Post really a solid news brand? As far as I am aware, they produce very little original content, relying instead on the aggregation of news from established players.

One man's aggregation is another man's theft ..

Posted by: Bryce | November 18, 2009 4:38 AM

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© 2003-2009 ReadWriteWeb

Cambridge, Mass. -- Martin T. Koszewski, 44, one of International Business Machines Corp.'s top salesmen, is wearing a navy-blue suit, burgundy tie and white shirt for his daily meetings with top computer buyers at mutual-fund giant Fidelity Investments.

But on his computer he is a master of the social-networking tools that are increasingly popular with a less staid set. When he flips open his laptop, he instant-messages with the fervor of a teenage girl. He has an avatar in the virtual community Second Life, which he has used to help with a sales pitch. He has a personal page in IBM's BluePages -- a kind of corporate equivalent of MySpace.com.

Flame Off

At most companies, public-relations managers and the human-resources department tightly control all electronic communications except for email and instant messaging. Companies' internal Web pages are just analogues of the corporate newsletters, forms and phone books that companies used in the previous century.

Tagging Interest

On Mr. McCarty's newsletter, "I trust employees to rank headlines" and pick what stories appear first, he says. Such ranking is done by "tagging," or suggesting keywords relevant to the stories. The more taggers, the more valuable the article is considered. When a person puts a tag on the page, it also lets the system know he or she is interested in subjects of that type, and w3 places such stories high on the employee's personal page.

Avatars and Islands

Other IBMers are using more-exotic social-networking tools. Grady Booch, one of IBM's senior software architects, who lives in Boulder, Colo., increasingly avoids travel. Instead he uses Second Life, an online virtual community owned by San Francisco-based Linden Lab. In Second Life, Mr. Booch has a long-haired, bearded avatar, which he concedes is "more buff than me." Recently, when he was closing on a second home in Hawaii, he managed to use his avatar to attend a meeting in Malaysia that was also taking place online. IBM owns more than 50 "islands" in Second Life and often uses them for lectures and group discussion

Wiki Central

Two years ago, IBM started Wiki Central to manage wikis for IBM groups. It now has more than 20,000 wikis online with more than 100,000 users.

Caught Mapping

A new feature of IBM's collaboration tools uses Google maps and instant-messaging tools to show people where their team members are. On a recent Monday morning, David Marshak, a program director at the Lotus unit, clicked on the program and saw a map indicating most of the people on his buddy list were working from their homes in the Boston area.

 

Nothing has put the mandate for doing well by doing good more front and center than the financial collapse one year ago. For three decades, Greed has been Good! Better than good, it was great!

In America in the 1930s, a chicken in every pot was the social goal. People in the Great Depression were literally starving. Anyone with parents or grandparents who lived through those times is familiar with stories of struggle and strife. In the 1940s, defending our freedom was the call of duty for every citizen. War brides dreaded the sight of uniformed men at the door and mothers prayed for their sons to return home alive. Honor and freedom were the goals citizen’s strove for on both sides of the Atlantic. In the 1950s, a safe and secure life climbing up the corporate ladder was all any family could want. Moms stayed at home baking apple pie and dads worked to put two cars in the garage. Father’s Knew Best, kids were respectful, and a common morality ruled.

In the 1960s, things got a bit more real again. A throwback to the 1940s, principles of right and wrong, justice and injustice threw the nation into a state of turmoil. We didn’t always believe the same thing, but at least we had beliefs. The 1970s brought with it a new restlessness in post-war America. There was no cause to fight for anymore. The apathy led to the Culture of Greed.

Oliver Stone made a movie ironically intended to expose the superficiality of the world of finance. Instead the Hollywood version of the money machine made Greed a Star. Gordon Gekko became an American idol and profit at any cost became glamorous.

It didn’t matter how you made money anymore, just that you made it. You could beg, borrow, and steal to get to the top and it was all acceptable. It was simply “good” business…

Now a new kind of good business is breaking through to the other side. No longer a fringe idea for those outside of society, the Business of Good is one of the biggest industries in the New Economy.

The Wall Street Journal, one of the Greed culture’s loudest voices, reported this week on the move of talented college grads out of finance and into “doing good” professions. A MIT graduate student who originally intended to go to Lehman Brothers switched his plan to engineering and solar-power technology. New grads are flocking in droves to social entrepreneurship careers, social advocacy start-ups, better world businesses, and environmentally sound green business endeavors.

Phew! More proof that there is silver lining in every dark cloud. And it only took a major economic catastrophe to do it!

Click for the latest updates on Good-B

GoodB Blog

via 3blmedia.com

By JAMES B. STEWART

Just a year ago, in the midst of the subprime meltdown, many of the nation's top universities and colleges were reporting significant gains. This year, the University of Pennsylvania is being hailed for Ivy League-leading results—with a decline of 15.7% for its fiscal year ended in June.

Results from other schools are still trickling in, but Harvard University has said it is expecting to report a drop of 30%, and Yale University about 25%. Considering the size of these endowments, these are staggering losses in absolute terms—many billions in the case of both Harvard and Yale.

Students soon will be heading back to larger classes, curtailed extracurricular activities and cheaper dining-hall fare. But the results are also of more than academic interest to investors like me, who have to some degree modeled their portfolios on the diversified asset-allocation model pioneered by Yale's chief investment officer, David Swensen. What I refer to as the Ivy League approach for individuals calls for diversification along similar lines as the large university endowments—equities (domestic and foreign), fixed income, and real assets (which includes commodities and real estate), but with a much higher allocation to so-called nontraditional asset categories: emerging-market equities and debt, energy and commodities. Yale allocated just 10% to U.S. equities and 4% to fixed income, with 15% in foreign equities and 29% in so-called real assets as of June 30, 2008.

The major difference is that most individual investors didn't qualify or otherwise couldn't invest in the hedge funds and private equity and venture-capital partnerships that make up a large part of university endowments. At Yale, 25% of the endowment was in what the university calls "absolute return," mostly hedge funds, and 20% was in private equity.

The irony is that turned out to be a huge advantage for individual investors this past year, when, in the midst of unprecedented market turmoil, many endowment managers learned the true meaning of "illiquid." The exits for most private equity and venture-capital funds slammed shut. Existing positions yielded no cash flow even as investment partnerships made new demands for funding. Many investors were forced to sell their liquid investments into weak markets to fund cash needs and to meet prior commitments to investment funds. Asset allocations went wildly out of balance, overweighted to illiquid partnerships as the value of equities plunged. It's a wonder that last year's results weren't even worse.

Liquidity turned out to be the Achilles' heel of the Ivy League model. But what about its core premise—diversification? True, nearly every asset category declined at some point in 2008, even those that were supposed to be uncorrelated, like equities and high-quality corporate bonds.

But for individuals who followed a diversification strategy—and who weren't forced to sell anything at distressed prices—those values have rebounded sharply, with many of the nontraditional categories, such as emerging-market equities and commodities, outperforming U.S. stock indexes. By sticking to liquid alternatives to private partnerships—such as mutual funds, exchange-traded funds, and real-estate investment trusts and publicly traded stocks and bonds—individual investors should have done far better than even the University of Pennsylvania.

Penn, too, found itself in quite a few illiquid partnerships. But it notched its league-beating return with some old-fashioned market timing. Chief Investment Officer Kristin Gilbertson recently told The Wall Street Journal that in early 2008 she started reducing the portion of the endowment in public equities to 43% from 53% and put about 15% in Treasurys. It turned out to be a shrewd move, and by endowment standards, which rarely stray from predetermined asset allocations, a bold one. The highly liquid Treasurys were one of the few assets to hold their value over the period and also enabled the university to meet capital calls from private-equity firms.

Market timing can be difficult, but I suspect some degree of it will increasingly be worked into endowment-allocation models. It will probably take years for the lessons of 2008 to be absorbed. But you can be sure that liquidity will gain new respect.

—James B. Stewart, a columnist for SmartMoney magazine and Smart-Money.com, writes weekly about his personal investing strategy. Unlike Dow Jones reporters, he may have positions in the stocks he writes about. For his past columns, see: www.smartmoney.com/commonsense.