Ziff Davis' Jason Boog is already reporting on Lightnet, further driving home the credibility of the concept. The Lightnet / Darknet discussion centers around the evolution of consumer assumptions about what is appropriate to do with content. There are so many definitions out there for the terms, I won't use this space to define them. What caught my eye is this part of Boog's article:
"In a Lightnet world, New York Times audio and video will be about as accessible as text," Lucas Gonze said. "Anybody will be able to e-mail the link to a friend, incorporate the item in a playlist, comment on the item on their own home page, and perhaps make a derived work in the form of a remix, Podcast, or videoblog."
This interests me in its relation to Web 2.0 and mainstream media. As structured blogging (site link) gains traction - traditional media companies will need to adapt in a totally new way.
Previously, news organizations were 100% push technology. Newspapers and TV news had strict deadlines that related to a point in time where they "went live". Now news organizations are always live. That was enough of a paradigm shift, but now they must give up strict control of their content.
Their content becomes source material for instant production on a distribution scale that will directly rival their own. Before, if I quoted the Wall Street Journal in my low-circulation publication the quote would rarely come back as a direct benefit to the WSJ. But now, it can immediately do so. The more people that link to the WSJ article, the more likely that article is to pop up in Google News or Technorati or del.icio.us or tech memeorandum or the myriad of other tools out there to find content.
So they must encourage bloggers - who are not competition, but rather their direct readership having conversations about their content. The mainstream media vs. blogger fight is phony. Bloggers need mainstream media and now, mainstream media needs bloggers.
In greater numbers, people are not subscribing to papers and are not watching television news. Why would one do so, when you can get much greater content on Google News at your leisure? But that content you are getting is coming from those same sources.
Multimedia content is going to become more important for mainstream media. They will need to provide video, audio, text, and supporting data. Most importantly, they will have to do something they are loathe to do: acknowledge the rest of the universe.
They will have to start linking out to sources, they will have to acknowledge conversations happening around their content.
The Lightnet / Darknet world shows that people's assumptions and relationships with content are changing dramatically. This is not due to people who want to steal music or other content. This is due to meeting a latent need for people to interact directly with their world - to communicate, to discuss, and to actually be involved.
Comments