The short answer is that print media of all types will disappear from our everyday lives the moment they cease to be profitable. Murdoch will pull the plug on the WSJ's print edition when there's even a hint it might go into the red, but he is planning - like AOL before him - to shift the online edition from subscription to advertiser supported. Why? Take a guess.

As access to the Internet becomes more & more ubiquitous, it may eventually absorb all media into itself, change them in the process, and continue to change them as time goes by. Culture (content) usually evolves faster than the media (forms of distribution) it uses. This, alas, is no longer the case.

Gauging the progress of old media absorption is as easy as measuring the flow of advertising dollars from old to new media over time. But gauging the onslaught of media evolution will not be as easy as counting widgets. Whole new media are already being born before our puzzled eyes.

Take maps. A short time ago, they were strictly a print media affair. Now, they are turning into a medium of their own. Maps talk to us, interact with us, guide us through our travels, and await an infinite amount of useful information to be layered onto them. Maps are going from something we occasionally used to something with us all the time that we use in ways they've never been used before.

New media "maps" provide an opportunity to ask dumb questions about old media like "newspapers." For instance, what do we really mean by "newspaper"? If the print form goes away, does that mean the content and organizations producing it disappear? As in any disruptive change, it will depend on their adaptability. News used to be something that only vied for our attention at idle moments. The technical barriers are now falling to its becoming something that can actually influence what we do at any moment in time wherever we happen to be.

YourStreet.com is a completely new and potentially lucrative way to deliver both professional and amateur news via online or mobile GPS maps. It is one of a growing number of search and social media applications based on Natural Language Processing. Think of NLP as a way to convert non-semantic Web 2.0 into semantic Web 3.0 without having to suffer through a labor-intensive, formal classification of every last little bit. Now, combine NLP with informal tagging and other user-generated content, and you have something that could fundamentally change the daily lives of everyone it touches.

YourStreet is apparently onto this and is plunging ahead despite a crowded field of mega-competitors. Let's hope they own some patents & trade secrets that are easier to licence or buy than work-around, because the infrastructure that could make them wildly popular is still years way.

To check the local news, enter your zip code, grab the map, and drag it to center on your street. It's that easy.

So when exactly will this brave new geospatially-localized Internet come into full bloom? While we will see lots of little hints like iPhone and YourStreet come & go over the next few years, all the hardware, software, content, and economic pieces will probably come together between 2010 and 2015. It will take at least that long to debug G-commerce (a geographically-enabled hybrid of e-commerce and regular commerce) and to recover from the approaching economic recession. If newspapers can maintain their current rate of decline, they may just be able to hold out till then.

 

 

 

IMP, Inc. works with a wide variety of professional talent to help clients produce audio, video, and textual content for television, radio, print, and Internet distribution. IMP makes content happen in any form.

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