The Internet future of the media

© Icqurimage 2005


Within ten years, many of Silicon Valley’s residents believe that there will be universal access to a global sphere of information previously unimaginable. All those connected to the Internet will contribute to and draw from it, creating a living, breathing ‘E-sphere’ of information. This seemingly infinite information resource will be trawled and mined by billions of spiders and ‘bots’, a virtual army which will categorise, filter, select and store the endless stream of information which is generated. With ever faster access to an ever expanding network, requested information will ultimately be made available within an instant, finely tailored to suit the specific interests of the individual. Searches and news bulletins will take into account the known interests, demography and commercial activity of the individual user - information that will be supplied by Spyware, Adware and countless credit card and information sources, theoretically secure but commercially universally available.
By 2020 information will be the currency and economy of the 21st Century, money being reduced to virtual credits on a silicon chip. The traditional print industry will be on its last legs, reducing the Press Barons from great riches to old rags. The US Mail and British Royal Mail will have long since passed away, victims of the relentless growth in electronic communications and media. Print publishers no longer wield the power of information, as all are now free to publish their views, information and ideas within the same universal medium of Cyberspace. It is search engines that now decide the impact and significance of information based upon personal recommendations (links) and the popularity of search terms, dethroning the patronage system of the press barons. Driven by an exponential growth in micropayments and advertising revenues, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and other information portals will battle it out for supremacy in what will become the major global industry of the early 21st Century.
A revolution in instant news casting from mobile phones will mean that news blogs and live web cam casts may now be presented by anyone, from anywhere, at anytime. E-news networks will cover every major City street with a battery of webcams, all piping live images on demand 24/7. This revolution in affordable technology makes everyone, everywhere a potential journalist, blogger or diarist. Thus neither space, nor time, nor network capacity will be rate-limiting for newscasting or the availability of information. Within an hour of any incident, launch or event there are already countless opinions, images, blogs and articles available to the inquisitive and the concerned. The new problem created by the new technology is the filtering, sorting, organising and prioritising of the endless information streams that are produced every hour of every day.
We are now lost in a desert of available information. The truth depends upon our guided perception of the available information, and we are struggling to keep pace with advances in technology. So precisely where and when did all of this begin? Where are we along the timeline of evolution of this brave new world, and where is all this taking us? Some believe that we are all already a part of a living, breathing, pulsating ‘media scape’, at the crossroads between the decline of traditional print media and the revolution of paperless technology. Good news for trees and for Microsoft, but what does this all mean for the way we will be living in fifteen years time?

A brief history of Internet Media

The mighty paper dragons of 20th Century were all asleep in 1989 when Tim Berners Lee, then at the CERN European Particle Physics Laboratory, invented the World Wide Web, an internet-based hypermedia initiative for global information sharing. The British visionary wrote the first web client (browser-editor) and server platform in 1990, which has within only 15 years evolved to become the all-pervading platform for new media. Nobody, not even the wealthy press barons and publishers, perhaps not even its creator, could have foreseen that the web would end the reign of these paper dragons within a generation. Entrepreneurs, programmers and scientists soon seized upon the World Wide Web's most attractive attributes as an information provider – its universal accessibility, versatility, portability, adaptability and speed. Within five years there was news of gold in the hills, and merchants, advertisers and information portals sprang up to create and meet the demands of this rapidly emerging market.
1991 Whilst most of us tend to follow a trend, there are always those visionaries and mystics who can see far into the future and smell profit. In October 1991, long before the Internet became a mass medium, Quantum changed its name to America Online (AOL). AOL was the first browser to navigate with icons and pictures rather than via text commands, and achieved popular acclaim (amongst the computer literati) with its innovative Chat Room, a device which allowed a large group of geographically separated people to hold conversations either privately or publicly.
1994 In January 1994 Yahoo! was founded by two Stanford graduate students, David Filo and Jerry Yang, sharing the goal to become the most popular global Internet information service for consumers and businesses. Operating through an Internet portal, Yahoo achieved its objectives, and now offers a web directory and a range of other services from interactive maps and weather forecasts, to news and Internet Mail. According to analysts Alexa Internet and Netcraft, Yahoo is currently the most popular website in the world, recording over 3 billion page views per day in October 2004.
1994 was a vintage year for the evolution of the Internet. Amazon was founded with the intention of using the Internet to sell everything, effectively a store based upon personalised recommendations which were compiled by computer and sold using the new medium of the Internet. Amazon became the first store that made recommendations, an interactive Internet equivalent of the mail order catalogue. Amazon was named after the giant South American river system with its innumerable branches and began life as a portal for books. Within ten years Amazon has since evolved from the biggest on-line book store in the world to a universal sales house for the purchase of almost anything.
Obviously the Internet needed a user-friendly interface, and in October 1994 Mosaic Communications launched the Netscape Internet browser which supported the universal language of the Internet, HTML.
1995 By the summer of 1995 most Web users were using the Netscape browser, and Netscape claimed a market share in excess of 80%. However, Microsoft soon launched its own web browser, Windows 1995.
EarthLink was founded by Sky Dayton in May 1995, introducing EarthLink Software, the world's first open and direct Internet access software. Earthlink went on to become one of the most innovative of the new media companies, inspiring hand-held Internet broadcasting (netcasting) to mobile personal data assistants (pda’s) and mobile phones.
1996 The so-called Browser Wars broke out in March 1996 with the launch of Netscape Navigator 2 which introduced a multi-level platform allowing many different software packages to run on it. In response AOL loaded Internet Explorer with its own software, to which Netscape responded with an explosion of color in August 1996 with the release of Navigator 3. A series of tit-for-tat upgrades and technological advancements followed which fuelled the meteoric development of browser technology. Then on September 3rd 1997, the point of revolution occurred when Netscape released its Netcenter Web site, transforming the browser into a media Internet interface featuring news, software, and chat groups. A cost-cutting war ensued when, in January 1998, Netscape announced that all future Netscape browsers would be available free of charge. This open-source policy effectively committed the Internet to the system of free user ware, advertising and micropayments that we know today.
On July 4th 1996 Microsoft launched the Internet’s first free mail program, Hotmail. Funded by advertisements, by the end of the Millennium Hotmail is the world's largest Email provider with more than 30 million active members.
1997 On the 17th December 1997, Pyra labs created Blogger, based upon Peter Merholz’s original concept of the weblog. The advent of the personalised web diary became a global fashion and a new medium of self-expression.
1998 On May 18th 1998 the US Justice Department filed an anti-trust suit alleging that Microsoft had abused its market position to thwart all competition, including Netscape, as it began to dominate the market. Later that same year AOL bought Netscape to strengthen its market challenge.
The Internet and its compliment of web sites grew at such a staggering rate that all users now needed a search and recommendation engine to compile and organise the vast database of available content. In 1998 the Google algorithm was created based upon the model that links are essentially recommendations. Google (by definition a very large number) was conceived in January of 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, then PhD students at Stanford University. The rest is history.
1999 The commercial power of the Internet becomes transparent when Shawn Fanning launches music file sharing program Napster. The music industry is in uproar and sues Napster successfully.
By 1999 AOL's subscriber base had grown to more than 10 million. Media giant Time Warner launches a bid for AOL. Too large to buy outright, the marriage of AOL and Time Warner was consumated on the 11th of January 2001, creating one of the Internet’s first media giants.
The launch of TiVo transformed the concept of television by removing it from the constraints of real time and the influence of commercials. TiVo allowed consumers to determine when, where and how they viewed their selected show, providing them with the capacity to pause, rewind, or replay any live television broadcast. Soon many Internet television stations fed by web cams appeared, all piped on demand to broadband and cable viewers.
2001 The concept of an information network created for the people by the people was further advanced on the 15th January 2001 with the inception of Wikipedia, a free content encyclopaedia which could be added to or edited by anyone. Seemingly a recipe for chaos and disorganisation, Wikipedia became a low cost model for information dissemination and compilation confounding its critics.
2002 Google launched its own news portal, GoogleNews. However, this was far from just another news portal, as GoogleNews is edited entirely by computers using algorithms to determine how old, how popular and how topical a news item is. Google’s strategy became a little clearer in 2003 when they acquire Blogger at the peak of the craze, as Google realised that a content network is central to their growth as a news portal. On Black Wednesday, December 2002, major redundancies are announced at Netscape headquarters as Microsoft consolidates its monopoly.
2003 Finally on the 29th May 2003 Microsoft paid $750 million to AOL Time Warner as part of a wide-ranging settlement which demanded co-operation on software distribution and digital media. AOL agreed to a seven-year royalty-free license of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser. This effectively ended Netscape as a browser, cementing the Internet Explorer monopoly that we know today.
The power and popularity of the Network was again demonstrated with the launch of Friendster in 2003. The brain child of former Netscape software engineer Jonathan Abrams, users could publish their images and interests for countless thousands of other sociable souls to see. Within months of its launch Friendster had been colonised by hundreds of thousands of young people anxious to make friends and publish details of their lives, interests and social networks. Using the principle of seven degrees of separation, Jonathan Abrams created an Internet interface which replicated how people really meet other people - via their friends and associates, his elegant interface serving to accelerate the process dramatically. Friendster was inspired by the shortcomings of on-line dating sites, the need to make friends, and also by the success of 'Napster'. Within a short space of time Friendster became the standard for social networking and personal information exchange.
2004 became a watershed year as the new media technologies finally began to impact upon every aspect of our daily lives. Reason Magazine famously sent all of its subscribers an issue which contained a satellite photo of their own house on the front cover, each issue being individually tailored to every subscriber.
Sony and Philips launch the world’s first mass-produced electronic paper, a new display technology that makes possible flexible displays which can be read in sunlight. Tiny black and white particles are suspended in capsules and are distributed in response to changes within an electrical field. The ultra-thin modern technology lends E-paper its flexibility and lightness.
In two bids to catch up with rivals, Google unveiled its new Gmail with advanced features, a search capability and one Gigabyte of free memory, whilst Microsoft launched its NewsBot social news filter. Newsbot provides an automated news service which searches over 4,800 news sources and blogs worldwide, allowing it to present almost instantaneous news coverage. By taking into consideration the interests of its users and their most frequent searches, Newsbot delivers the most recent news that is of personal interest to its consumers.
Amazon entered into the search engine market with the launch of A9, a search engine based upon Google technology which incorporates Amazon’s market leading recommendations based algorithm. A9 is a novel concept which attempts to create a commercial search engine which focuses purely upon E-commerce web sites. This revolutionary year was capped when Google floated its shares on the stock exchange, using the capital raised from the flotation to buy TiVo.
2005 In February 2005 Netscape launched a second upgrade of its browser launched based upon the popular open source browser Firefox. Meanwhile Microsoft responded to Google’s ambitions by acquiring Friendster.

A glimpse into the future

Forecasting the future of Information Technology and the media has become as popular as it is lucrative. With billions at play on the stock markets, a single optimistic profit forecast or takeover may send the market into a frenzy. However when the three factors of unpredicatable consumer tastes, unforeseeable rates of technological advancement, and the ingenuity of software engineers are considered, forecasting becomes a fragile and quickly forgotten occupation.
In 2006 Google plans to combine and to integrate all of its services, including TiVo, Blogger, GMail, GoogleNews, and its search engine within a single expansive Google Grid. The Google Grid will provide a universal platform with unlimited space and bandwidth for the storage and dissemination of all Internet media. The Google Grid may be accessed privately anytime, anywhere, and all interactions may be stored remotely within the Google Grid. This will vastly improve processing times and allow the contination of on-line projects, or work strings, rather than using the net solely to perform discrete actions.
In 2007 is it widely believed that Microsoft will launch its new service Newsbotster, a social news network and participatory-journalism platform. Nothing new you might say? However Newsbotser is far from familiar, as it will actively rank and sort news articles based upon each individual user’s social network activity, thereby encouraging group participation and discussion. There are many who believe that Newsbotster will prefer Sony’s ePaper as its medium of choice, throwing down a mighty challenge to the traditional newspaper barons.
Given the vast cost and scale of the infrastructure, programming and maintenance of these new interactive media super-networks, many old rivals may merge activities to remain competitive. The giants of interactive media, namely AOL Time Warner, Yahoo, Microsoft and Google, will continue to buy out promising start-ups as they emerge. Soon only the giants will remain to contest the global market of news & information portals. By combining detailed knowledge of every user’s social network, location, demographics and consumer behavior, all content will be supremely customised to serve to an increasingly spoilt, pandered and impatient user.
By 2010 the traditional print magazines and newspapers, burdened by their heavy payrolls and slow human networks, will no longer be able to compete effectively with the new electronic news media. Faced with increasingly up-to-date and polished competitors, they will slowly recede to focus upon their traditional and aging markets, leaving the new electronic dragons in complete command of the news and information industry. Google will by now have entered academia and replaced the publishing houses to supply E-books, academic journals and popular fiction. By 2016 Mr.Gates will have finally driven the last nail into the coffin of the printing industry as electronic paper has become the standard, helping to save the dwindling Amazonian rain forest.
Google will finally perfect the algorithm that constructs news stories dynamically, using tailored information and facts stripped from a vast range of blogs and content sources, recombining them to appeal maximally to its personalised consumer base. The individual finally becomes king as all information and consumer services revolve around their every whim and interest. Newsbots which strip content to create instant personalised news articles will raise copyright issues that will drag on for years into the highest courts. In the meantime they will become slicker and learn to use a thesaurus function and content scrambler to evade copyright.
The new generation of mobile phones incorporate all functions from MP3 players, to webcams to cameras. By 2015 all mobile phones will be second generation pda’s (personal digital assistants), in essence high speed portable computers. These will in turn become biosensors, measuring and responding to the needs and daily cycles of their consumers. Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication (RSS) will have matured to generate instantaneous updates of every event of interest to an individual, from football scores, to share price alerts, to news events. The computer will encode speech and relay information through sound as well as via image feeds. Speech will be encoded into text commands and the most familiar voice you will hear will not be that of your partner, but that of your computer. All appointments, SMS, RSS feeds, and phone messages will be filtered and relayed according to a programmed personal schedule, with quiet times entered into the memory either personally or via the corporate network. The computer will rest and resume its activity with its user, inform the individual according to his or her availability, and will rank and prioritise commands and information. All media will finally have merged into one master language.
Many believe that the human race will become a single collective conciousness connected through the Internet, known as the "Evolving Personalized Information Construct" or EPIC. The availability of information will no longer be rate-limiting as software will focus upon organising and prioritising the vast, sprawling deserts of information that are generated. Some five billion individuals will constantly contribute to the information network, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, through personal data records, blog entries, video reports, articles, heart rates, genetic sequences and neural activity. The economy of the Internet will have shifted from cash to instant micropayments, as all services will be paid for with vast volumes of tiny electronic payments. Authors will be paid micropayment royalties, as will bloggers and a new generation of webcam models who will now send daily personalised images and encouragements to their millions of admirers. A new generation of freelance editors has sprung up, as vast integrated groups many thousands of miles apart combine forces to comb, edit and filter the huge streams of information flowing through the GoogleGrid. The integrators and filter feeders are now on the front row of the social grid, as the new media technologies have made the function of memory almost obsolete. Their selective, fast and highly ordered minds will sift through the information streams, discarding unwanted facts and panning for gold within an electronic torrent of opportunities and events. The individual is king, the individual is a node on a vast network.

© Icqurimage 2005