Is that Demand Manufactured?
As some of you may know, I started out as a radio journalist. And when I discovered the web in around 1996, I knew that, to me, radio and TV were not the dominant news media any longer. Nowhere but on the web was it possible to research and cross-reference from dozens or resources with various origins. You could directly access the press agencies for news without having to read the politically or sensationalist tainted derivates in various outlets. The amazing thing was the humble link. And as the cool kids said back then Cool URIs don’t change. In other words, the web was about retention and accumulation of content. An ever growing library that by its very nature was self-indexing and cross-referencing. And this is what is being actively killed these days. But let’s go back a bit before I start focusing on that problem. Let’s take a peek at the slow decline of the web as a news medium.
The great thing about the web was that everyone could become a publisher and let their voice be heard. Finding places to write and create web pages was easy. But many of them were also short-lived and we learned the hard way when - for example - Geocities shut down, "free" didn’t mean "yours forever online". When "web2.0" became a thing, the publishing model got turned on its head. Instead of writing in an own publication, the idea was to comment and do smaller posts on a topic, linking to resources, or adding a funny image without alternative text. Accumulatively adding to threads, so to say. A bit of a reminder of Bulletin Boards or Forums, but with less focus. At that time I worked on various social media ideas in Yahoo, hitherto one of the main sources for people’s daily news, replacing daily papers. The model of Yahoo and others back then was simple: buy news content, spruce it up a bit and show ads around it.
As some of you may know, I started out as a radio journalist. And when I discovered the web in around 1996, I knew that, to me, radio and TV were not the dominant news media any longer. Nowhere but on the web was it possible to research and cross-reference from dozens or resources with various origins. You could directly access the press agencies for news without having to read the politically or sensationalist tainted derivates in various outlets. The amazing thing was the humble link. And as the cool kids said back then Cool URIs don’t change. In other words, the web was about retention and accumulation of content. An ever growing library that by its very nature was self-indexing and cross-referencing. And this is what is being actively killed these days. But let’s go back a bit before I start focusing on that problem. Let’s take a peek at the slow decline of the web as a news medium.
The great thing about the web was that everyone could become a publisher and let their voice be heard. Finding places to write and create web pages was easy. But many of them were also short-lived and we learned the hard way when - for example - Geocities shut down, "free" didn’t mean "yours forever online". When "web2.0" became a thing, the publishing model got turned on its head. Instead of writing in an own publication, the idea was to comment and do smaller posts on a topic, linking to resources, or adding a funny image without alternative text. Accumulatively adding to threads, so to say. A bit of a reminder of Bulletin Boards or Forums, but with less focus. At that time I worked on various social media ideas in Yahoo, hitherto one of the main sources for people’s daily news, replacing daily papers. The model of Yahoo and others back then was simple: buy news content, spruce it up a bit and show ads around it.