Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Just as news publishers come to terms with Web 2.0, along comes Web 3.0 to shake things up

I'm modifying my previous post about my final project proposal. While I will include some of the ways the Internet and the development of web 2.0 social networking tools have affected journalism with the emergence of citizen journalism and the devastation being wrought on the business models of media outlets everywhere, I want to explore the emergence of web 3.0 and how the "semantic web" may change parts of the very definitions of journalism. The role of journalist may expand to include computer programmers as well as writers and photographers (or should I say multi-media specialists?) There are some in the industry that feel the tools and methods of web 3.0 may offer new opportunities for the survival of all forms of legacy media and which will necessitate a concentration on increased local coverage and the use of citizen journalists, among other things, like this Knight proposal from the People's Times in New Zealand.

Jeff Jarvis: "Owning content may not be valuable. it may be links, it may be embedding..the essential structure of media is yet to change." (1:47 video, Shot with a Flip camera, talking about the Digital News Affairs 2009 Conference)


There has been a quiet buzz going on around this issue. Like so much else in the media industry there are lots of questions and uncertainties. There is enough interest to justify conferences and grants to explore possibilities. The writings of Clay Shirky, Jeff Jarvis (see above) and others are looking into this, and the Knight News Challenge has provided grants to such internet and pioneers as Tim Berners-Lee and Martin Moore and Dan Pacheco of the The Bakersfield Californian to do research. There is also software being developed like Calais, "a free program that scans content and suggests meta tags that computers can read to automate the process of relating and linking information by topic." How this affects journalism- and IF it does- will be interesting to investigate.

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