At TecTrends we go through the tech and business press because you don’t have time to. We pull out the most interesting and noteworthy items, and our writers concisely and readably summarize the essentials. Each month we bundle these summaries of key articles together for a range of major industries in the high tech sector, from Medical Research and Green Technologies to Social Networking and Cloud Computing. Each is indexed by company, product, and search term. These compilations are TecTrends Reporters.
The August TecTrends Reporter on New Media is one of them, summarizing and indexing 26 noteworthy articles relating to some aspect of new media. TecTrends Reporter tells you in a nutshell what the trade and business press is saying now about new media.
We choose the most useful articles, but our software determines the printing sequence. Glancing at the contents page my eye was caught by a fortuitous sequence of titles:
The New Maelstrom of Social Media
Everyone’s Social (Already)
You’re Not Social (Enough)
All (Almost) on the Internet
Together they have a Delphic quality. If you could tune in on the collective buzz of everyone who follows technology, and distill it down, this is what you would hear. Then, as with the oracle, you’d have to make sense of it. But that is what TecTrends Reporters are for.
Everyone has discovered social media. One author grumps about ‘Digg and the Me Generation,’ but businesses are finding an unexpected side effect to the spread of social media: People are talking about them and their products, and they have a chance to join in the conversation. The article just ahead of the quartet I listed, ‘The New Interaction of Social Media’, takes up the theme of using social media to engage with customers. This theme continues with the middle pair of the quartet, ”Everyone’s Social (Already),’ while ‘You’re Not Social (Enough)’ looks at one firm that is fostering its own internal social network.
The last of our quartet, ‘All (Almost) on the Internet,’ is not about social media but the spread of freely available online information, in this case, high quality scientific information. This is on the bright side of the other big story in the world of media:
What is going to happen to print? The first article, ‘The Future of Reading’ looks at another interesting bright side: Many authors are finding that making their books available online helps them sell more print copies, not fewer. Online release triggers online discussion, and the discussion brings in more readers. But newspapers are struggling to cope with the world of online free news. One title, ‘Papers Try to Bridge Print, Web Revenue Gap,’ tells the story in a nutshell; the article describes some of the ways papers are trying to make online content pay. Another article also tells its story up front; ‘Internet Paid Content: Back to the Future?’ (Perhaps, says the author, but first the content providers need to learn what people are willing to pay for.)
It isn’t all social media and print. These are the themes dominating current discussion of new media, but other discussions are going on, and TecTrends Reporter looks in on them. ‘Web 2.0 and the Law,’ looks at the implications of Web 2.0 technology for law enforcement. Another article has a title too long to blog, but shows how application programming interfaces (APIs) can serve as a marketing tool to extend the reach of messages and product information.
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