With Belinda being a journalist, former Chief of Staff of a major Australian newspaper, and now PR person, the coming 'death of the 4th estate' is a common and hotly-contested discussion in our house. She doesn't think it will happen. I think it already has happened, they just haven't realized it yet. The inflection point came and went and no-one in the media paid enough attention to realize they are already irrelevant to the people who are relevant.
ANYWAY... I was listening to Engadget's podcast #15 this morning (another awesome job by Phillip and Lenn... damn these guys are setting a benchmark for podcasting!!!) and they played EPIC 2014, an 8 minute scenario depicting what happens to the media (and Google, amazon and Microsoft) over the next decade. It's a stimulating and chilling listen. If you haven't heard it yet, I recommend it.
I watched Epic 2014 too.
It's quite interesting.
It does make you wonder what's in store for the future.
I showed it to a friend yesterday, and he said it (to him) painted a very scary future where organisations had fairly much access to all your details and could just pin-point advertisements to you, etc...
I know a lot of people are still going to be quite paranoid if a large corporation is holding all of their key sensitive information.
The news service(s) were interesting though, with blogs we are a part of that news service.
We (bloggers) provide additional commentary to current news events.
The world of the unpolished, dynamic news (aka blogs). It's still got a little while to go to really catch on, but it's getting there.
I remember when i-mode was launched in Australia, I had quite an increase in hits from people doing google searches for news on i-mode. (Even some from within Telstra)
Although I didn't have much info on i-mode, it was still interesting to see the hits come. It means that people don't need to rely solely on the traditional media. Though, there is always the question of media bias, as well as blogger biases.
Which news source to trust? Or maybe a mixture of both? How do you know the blogger doesn't have a stake in what they are reporting. I guess people have put in an amount of trust into their traditional news sources to not lead them wrong, and with blogging, you need to establish that between the readers and the author(s).
I wonder if we'll have more virtual newsreaders (like Ananova -- http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/718327.stm and http://www.ananova.com) reading news from blogs, etc...
Posted by: William Luu | Tuesday, November 30, 2004 at 10:47 AM