Recent events highlighted the rising importance of citizens in the production of contents made available to billions of people - these contents being in turn highly valued by traditional media. Examples:
- London blasts this summer (Flickr)
- Sexual offense in NY subway (still Flickr!)
- New Orleans Hurricane (so much at Flickr!)
Impact of this might be huge in next 3 years - and certainly not limited to pictures and movie broadcasts.
1. Traditional media will have to adapt themselves, rely more and more on citizens even if they should not encourage them, and enrich their own analysis and content to remain competitive
2. A parallel sector will emerge as players such as Flickr will become a reference for both producers of content and consumers. Successful players will either be niche players (focusing on specific type of events, media or matters) or global players whose value will be to structure and arrange information so that each of us can define its own program.
3. Overal revenue are likely to fall as content will become free of access - new business model should emerge, massively relying on content mediation and advertisement (good news for consumers!)
A list of good sites (some in French, sorry):
http://www.agoravox.fr - takes analysis from blogs and publishing a daily newspaper
http://www.lemonde.fr - recently made available web space for bloggers - publishes some parts on their website
http://www.flickr.com - the place to go whenever there is a breaking news
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page - A page similar to Wikipedia, where users post images and articles
My point is not to claim my worship for Flickr - but to state that the primary source of information for the average citizen might not be BBC or CNN in the future, but a self aggregation of contents that would be produced by citizens themselves. I would set three major drivers for this:
My point is not to claim my worship for Flickr - but to state that the primary source of information for the average citizen might not be BBC or CNN in the future, but a self aggregation of contents that would be produced by citizens themselves. I would set three major drivers for this:
- "Production reflex": devices that can help capture and store become available for the average people. You don't need much money and technological expertise anymore to produce it. Moreover, younger generation are educated sooner and sooner with these tools. Hence broader adoption of "production reflex" is still to be expected in next 10 years
- "Communication made easy": transmitting one's production is more and more easy, even from unusual places (exotic countries, subways, etc.) and access to this - in return - is facilitated by widely available Internet connections, RSS aggregators that help arranging and structuring the information, search engine (google, flickr) that attempt to rank the information
- "Lack of trust towards traditional media": conflict of interest errod the trust towards media. Examples are numerous: Jason Blair fake articles in NY Times, last US presidential campaign, in France no words on Nicolas Sarkozy' marital problems, etc. Citizens have doubt on analysis and coverage coming from traditional media and naturally trust equivalent of themselves.
More analysis on Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/wiredmag/1,2167,68622,00.html
From wired: Do we even need the Times anymore?
The pros still have one thing most amateurs don't: resources. Grassroots reporting fills the gaps in mainstream coverage, keeps members of the old guard on their toes, and shines when there's a premium on fast facts from the scene. But laypeople can't do much with a story like Watergate or Enron. "Big investigative projects require deep pockets," Gillmor says. "I'm not trying to tell anyone that we don't need paid journalists. I hope for an ecosystem where many forms of information can survive and thrive."
Update: blog lovers might know this name "Roland Piquepaille" who is famous for his posts on technology trends - he was recently by ZDNEt to integrate his columns. Here is an interview from the master, that will give you insights on how Publishers might integrate bloggers in their contents in the future.
Eventually, a solution for developing AJAX based applications on mobile devices has been proposed. This opens up huge opportunities and could have tremendous impact on the mobile telecommunications landscape.
