F. The Transport of Information - Internet NewsInternet news are advantaged. They are frequently and dynamically updated (unlike static print news) and are always accessible (similar to print news), immediate and fresh.
The future will witness a form of interactive news. A special "corner" in news Web site will accommodate "breaking news" posted by members of the public (or corporate press releases). This will provide readers with a glimpse into making of news, raw material news are made of. The same technology will be applied to interactive TVs. Content will be downloaded from internet and displayed as an overlay on TV screen or in a box in it. The contents downloaded will be directly connected to TV programming. Thus, biography and track record of a football player will be displayed during a football match and history of a country when it gets news coverage.
4. Terra Internetica - Internet, an Unknown Continent
Laymen and experts alike talk about "sites" and "advertising space". Yet, Internet was never compared to a new continent whose surface is infinite.
The Internet has its own real estate developers and construction companies. The real life equivalents derive their profits from scarcity of resource that they exploit - Internet counterparts derive their profits from tenants (content producers and distributors, e-tailers, and others).
Entrepreneurs bought "Internet Space" (pages, domain names, portals) and leveraged their acquisition commercially by:
Renting space out; Constructing infrastructure on their property and selling it; Providing an intelligent gateway, entry point (portal) to rest of internet; Selling advertising space which subsidizes tenants (Yahoo!-Geocities, Tripod and others); Cybersquatting (purchasing specific domain names identical to brand names in "real" world) and then selling domain name to an interested party. Internet Space can be easily purchased or created. The investment is low and getting lower with introduction of competition in field of domain registration services and increase in number of top domains.
Then, infrastructure can be erected - for a shopping mall, for free home pages, for a portal, or for another purpose. It is precisely this infrastructure that developer can later sell, lease, franchise, or rent out.
But this real estate bubble was culmination of a long and tortuous process.
At beginning, only members of fringes and avant-garde (inventors, risk assuming entrepreneurs, gamblers) invest in a new invention. No one knows to say what are optimal uses of invention (in other words, what is its future). Many - mostly members of scientific and business elites - argue that there is no real need for invention and that it substitutes a new and untried way for old and tried modes of doing same things (so why assume risk of investing in unknown and untried?).
Moreover, these criticisms are usually well-founded.
To start with, there is, indeed, no need for new medium. A new medium invents itself - and need for it. It also generates its own market to satisfy this newly found need.
Two prime examples of this self-recursive process are personal computer and compact disc.
When PC was invented, its uses were completely unclear. Its performance was lacking, its abilities limited, it was unbearably user unfriendly. It suffered from faulty design, was absent any user comfort and ease of use and required considerable professional knowledge to operate. The worst part was that this knowledge was exclusive to new invention (not portable). It reduced labour mobility and limited one's professional horizons. There were many gripes among workers assigned to tame new beast. Managers regarded it at best as a nuisance.
The PC was thought of, at beginning, as a sophisticated gaming machine, an electronic baby-sitter. It included a keyboard, so it was thought of in terms of a glorified typewriter or spreadsheet. It was used mainly as a word processor (and outlay justified solely on these grounds). The spreadsheet was first real PC application and it demonstrated advantages inherent to this new machine (mainly flexibility and speed). Still, it was more of same. A speedier sliding ruler. After all, said unconvinced, what was difference between this and a hand held calculator (some of them already had computing, memory and programming features)?