What is the future for Web sites in a world of RSS? - Matt McAlister of InfoWorld writes that the possibility of disintermediating the web via RSS brings to mind ghosts from 1998 and the "death of print" that was going around;
The day InfoWorld's top news RSS feed received more requests than our home The day InfoWorld's top news RSS feed received more requests than our home page, I started thinking a frightening thought: RSS is doing to the Web today what the Web has been doing to print for the last several years. We have disintermediated our Web site by offering our news in an easier to access format...again. Just as the Web ultimately created more opportunity rather than less, RSS will open up some new doors for the media business. What's behind those doors may even become more profound than what we're doing with traditional online media properties today. But the ghost in the closet is a bit scary, probably big, and definitely ugly on first glance.
(via Susan Mernit who adds a comment about mobile search and, it's great to see that she has finally added trackbacks)
So much of what this is about the future of newspapers and of news but what about other forms of media like magazines and books. I don't see the
Sometimes it is hard to remember that the Internet isn't the web. From the wikipedia:
The Internet, or simply the Net, is the publicly available worldwide system of interconnected computer networks that transmit data by packet switching using a standardized Internet Protocol (IP) and many other protocols. It is made up of thousands of smaller commercial, academic, and government networks. It carries various information and services, such as electronic mail, online chat and the interlinked web pages and other documents of the World Wide Web. Because this is by far the largest, most extensive internet (with a small i) in the world, it is simply called the Internet (with a capital I)
Yesterday I posted a link to an OJR article about the future of magazines. In it there was this quote:
Online Journalism Review: The Magazine Publishers of America envisions a Jetsons-like future where people take floating baths but are still using the old print magazines to read in the bath. What do you imagine might change about the physical nature of magazines in the decades to come? More tablet or e-ink readers?
Jeff Jarvis: I don't see the form changing in profound ways at all (unless you consider a new size a profound change; I don't). It's a quite separate matter to ask whether magazine content -- feature writing, long-form writing, in-depth reporting, strong photography -- will be distributed via other media -- namely, online -- and become multimedia, with audio, video conversation. Would that still be a magazine? No, I think it would be a mistake to try to import the old definition to the new thing -- whether that is magazines or newspapers or TV or radio. Magazines are magazines. Paper is paper. New things are new things.
