Secondly, no, I will NEVER use twitter, because it’s a heavily limited and corrupted service. You won’t get better in writing with this service, so forget it.

Thirdly, I use RSS extensively, I even read more feeds than browsing the web. I simply love it.

Fourthly, yes, of course you can watch videos here in the future. All our mediae we made and maintain, e.g. gizmeo.com or zockerseele.com, use this feature very often. Sometimes it is simply better for transporting important informations or explaining difficult topics.

All the best

Thank you again for the link, I will read it up soon!

Well, the problems of the “American establishment media” shouldn’t be the problems of new media. I would also like to see especially the NYT arrive finally in the 21. century, but it seems like not very advanced and not very self-confident if they need Google for their future developments. They should know, come on, the tools are there, just use them! They should have their own labs, what did they do the last 20 years?

“It’s already happening”

Of course it’s already happening, that’s why I point to these as “trends” not “predictions.” These are the trends that I’m most interested in.

I agree that companies like Blogger, Facebook, and Twitter are media companies – but it’s taken awhile for them to be perceived as such (especially by the American establishment media). And my real point is that these sorts of things had to come from startups instead of coming from R&D labs within established media companies. Companies like The New York Times need things like “Google Labs” to experiment with media technology. They’ve been passive in the development of technology.

These content-farms don’t produce real content, it’s content for the machine, not human beings.

So you think of “context” as a Wiki or something? Or an appendix where you can read up relevant terms. That would make sense, but it’s already happening, e.g. political blogs which want to explain special terms.

I fully ack your opinion with the news media, but I would like to see them doing their jobs better NOW.

We also have different views of media and tech startups. I think blogger for example is a media company, not a tech company. Same with Twitter or Facebook. Their product is purely virtual and you can’t grab it in reality at all. That is a difference to technology, like Apple, as I see it.

Your view with individuals as brands is not naive, it’s reality in the USA. See Michael Jordan and his Jordan brand. But I don’t think anyone should do it. It’s like projecting the American way into individuals who don’t live there and that just doesn’t make sense.

Europe is no new media or technology innovative continent (YET, I hope…). But look at Japan, Sony is tech AND media company at the same time.

“Context is in fact important, but only if you want to sell advertising.”

Perhaps we’re operating on two different definitions of context here – how can you say context is only important for selling advertising? First of all “content farms,” completely devoid of any substance or context, are able to make money hand-over-fist on advertising. So I don’t think context as quick money maker. Context is important for giving readers a complete understanding of the content they’re reading and helping them truly understand the issues you’re writing about. In the long run I think it will be better for business if news media do their jobs better, and I think focusing on context does that – so in that sense context will be good for selling advertising. But its importance is so much greater than that.

“It’s nothing new, however, that we see shifting media companies to tech companies.”

It shouldn’t be, but thus far we haven’t seen enough (at least in the states). Why didn’t web directories, search engines, blogging platforms, microblogging platforms, social networking, etc. come out of media companies instead of “tech” startups? Why were those startups seen as tech instead of media? As recently as the early 00s we were still calling social media “social software.” Companies like the NYT are finally getting in the game after a couple decades.

It’s perhaps naive of me to expect that individuals can also be brands and maintain integrity and credibility, but I also don’t see them having much of a choice. And it’s not like they can do much worse than the companies they serve(d) in most cases.

“But no concept for Europe or other parts of the world.”

I admit to being very US-centric – it’s hard enough to keep up with everything going on here, let alone the rest of the world. I disagree that these concepts aren’t relevant elsewhere. Sources are going direct everywhere, context is universally valuable, Jarvis’s first “journalist as brand” example was a British sportswriter (and I might cite the South Korean financial writer Park Dae-Sung as another example), the premier “reporting service” is the Economist Intelligence Unit (out of the UK), and I don’t see European media companies as immune from the need to develop their own tech innovations (Asian media companies may be ahead enough of the curve that this is irrelevant to them, but I don’t know enough about Asian media companies yet).