Scan-N-Land

Manifesto for the Interactive Medium

I believe that in a lot of ways, the industry is still grappling with the same fundamental question it was asking itself five years ago: Should our focus be on applying the best standards and values of the old medium – or should it be innovating and shaping a completely new medium? I have always argued that the answer should be “all of the above.” Standing for important things and being willing to embrace the new are not mutually exclusive.

What Google and Yahoo have recognized is that information and advertising are wedded. They are developing tools to deliver highly-individualized content (that is information) to people and then selling the information about those people to advertisers. They micro-target distribution of information in order to micro-target distribution of advertising.

But in the end the argument about paid online content leaves out a crucial factor. It doesn’t matter if we believe we need to be paid for our content in order to survive. What matters is if readers believe they need to pay for our content on the Internet.
--Rati Sud

posted by Mark H. @ 11/26/2006 12:14:00 PM