mediajunk

Last August, I blogged about a book I was reading, called Wake Up: Survive and Prosper in the Coming Economic Turmoil.

While the book was little known, it's authors made some dire predictions that have turned out to be prescient (Wake Up was published in September 2005). For example, they forecast that:

• the housing market in the U.S. and many other Western countries would collapse
• the dollar would begin a slow, inexorable slide that will continue for many years
• a worldwide recession was imminent...
• and that this recession would deepen into a worldwide depression, leading to deflation

Given this gloomy picture, what is a small business owner to do? Well, don't panic. I believe that the web services industry will prosper in the difficult economic times ahead. Of course, companies are going to look to trim fat, and large, over-priced IT consulting projects will fall foul of many corporate and government cost-cutting knifes.

Overall however, I expect use of the web to grow in times of recession.

• Large businesses will spend more on improving their websites, and on online advertising, as the web offers a lower-cost and increasingly effective alternative to traditional media and marketing.
• Small to medium sized businesses will make more services available online, because of the savings this represents.
• More online businesses will emerge, offering cheaper and better services that improve on existing models and offer greater savings to consumers.
• Consumers will spend more time online, in all sorts of activities like looking for work, shopping for best prices, using VOIP services to save on phone bills, etc.

That's not to suggest things will get easier for providers. As the ever-colourful Michael O'Leary might put it, the web services industry is going to become a bloodbath. But web services aren't going away, you know.

I had a lively chat yesterday with the founders of a new PR/Communications company, a client of ours. We discussed PR and the internet, and agreed that few PR companies in Ireland are using the internet to its full potential.

The reasons are understandable. People who are experienced in traditional media often find it difficult to embrace the internet, because they see it as a variant of publishing, rather than a new medium. Advertising and PR practitioners tend to regard a website as a digital version of a glossy print brochure, or (worse!) an opportunity to "wow" people with a moving, clicking, whirring, music-blaring, pop-up advertisement. In short, they use tricks that work in traditional media, to little -- or negative -- effect.

Ironically, as Paul Holmes points out in his Manifesto for the 21st Century Public Relations Firm, PR companies should have been the first to embrace the internet since, right from the outset, "the Internet was in many respects a public relations medium". The model of information dissemination used by PR firms -- a targetted, viral model, dependent on active intermediaries -- was encoded in the internet's DNA.

The Internet was about information and education, not promotion, because it gave people unprecedented control over the messages to which they were exposed.

It was about earning attention rather than demanding it. It was about dialogue rather and conversation rather than monologue. And it was about multiple stakeholder groups rather than customers alone.

When I did Media Studies in college, I was familiar with Marshall McLuhan's epiteth, "The medium Is the message", but I never really grasped it. McLuhan had been writing at a time when a new medium, television, was changing the information-dissemination landscape, but by the time I was studying his words, television had become the dominant channel.

Now his words make sense. If you can show people that you "get" the internet, you are sending out a clear message to your audience. Part of getting the internet, for example, is to understand that transparency rules (and rules tyranically, according to trendspotting); deception is not tolerated.

Says Holmes:

bq.Employees, customers and community members will have access to communications channels almost equal to that of the largest corporations, and any inaccuracy or insincerity will be quickly identified as such and exposed—not only undermining the company’s message but produced the precise opposite result from that intended.

We have already seen examples of this trend, from a blog covertly funded by Wal-Mart to a YouTube video supposedly created by an ordinary citizen but in reality posted by a public relations firm representing Exxon Mobil. In both cases, the fraud was quickly exposed and the companies held up to ridicule and condemnation.

In a crisis, even in a tyranny, there is opportunity. The web offers unprecedented opportunity for PR companies. Want to boost hotel bookings? Forget airbrushed photos; get to the top of Tripadvisor.

Embrace the internet; figure out its rules and play by them. You'll soon see opportunities that couldn't have existed even a few years ago.

In my last entry, I argued that we were seeing the end of the internet era. My thinking was that the Cambrian explosion in internet technologies has ground to a halt. Websites have become standardised -- two column or three column layout, horizontal tabbed main menu, vertical local menu. HTML, like the QWERTY keyboard, is here to stay.

Today, cyberfriends, I want to tell you that it's not all doom and gloom. Yes, the internet revolution is over, but only in its technical domain. Now that the dust has settled, and the internet is just infrastructure, a new revolution beckons: an innovation explosion.

Reiner Evans of Trendwatching believes there has never been a better time to be an entrepreneur.

Trendwatching identifies patterns in market innovations and new consumer behaviour. While a fraction of this innovation comes from new web-based businesses, the internet is driving innovation in offline sectors.

The internet has unleashed a global infolust, where consumers invest their time (and, for many, enjoy) researching how to get the cheapest flights to Bratislava; the best hotel for their budget; the DVD player that can play their Divx movies; a pink version of that Abercrombie & Fitch hoodie; etc. As Trendwatching puts it:

Experienced consumers are lusting after detailed information on where to get the best of the best, the cheapest of the cheapest, the first of the first, the healthiest of the healthiest, the coolest of the coolest, or on how to become the smartest of the smartest. Instant information gratification is upon us.

So what's that got to do with innovation? As any Darwinist knows, when the environment changes quickly, organisms change quickly too. The consumer environment -- a.k.a. the market -- has changed, changed utterly. Products and services are rapidly mutating. But only the fittest will survive.

As I was reading Read/Write Web's predictions for 2008, it struck me: there will be no dramatic new web-based technologies this coming year, or (perhaps) ever again.

The Internet Era, which began in the early 1990s, is coming to an end. Web 2.0 did not signal a new acceleration in technological development; rather, it was an afterthought, an increase in both usability and availability of online tools, allowing the public to engage on a mass scale.

Yes, we are going to see further enhancements to social networking sites, and more user-generated content. And yes, technologies such as online video will continue to improve.

But the pace of change engendered by internet technologies has definitely begun to slow down. The web in 2008 will not be altogether different from the web in 2007. One sarcastic commenter on Read/Write Web said his number one prediction for 2008 was that there will be "Way more cute cat videos on the web".

The internet revolution is over. The next technological revolution will happen elsewhere.

Update: Reading Sitepoint's Future of the Web in 2008 has strengthened my belief that things are happening a lot more slowly in webland these days.

Something deep in my genetic makeup compels me to be a generalist rather than a specialist; a jack-of-all-trades ... and a master of none. That latter quip used to annoy me, a stick for my inner voices to beat me with.

But what could I do about it? The process was (and is) always the same. I take an interest in acquiring a new skill -- speaking Italian, figuring out PHP, creating Flash animations, writing novels, lifting weights ... etc. At first, I take to the new skill with aplomb and gusto, astonishing myself and others at my ability to learn rapidly. I move from beginner to intermediate level in no time.

But that's as far as I get. I never get beyond intermediate level.

Like I said, my personality prevents it. When the rapid learning phase is over, I get bored. I itch for a new challenge. Persisting with the previous challenge may eventually make me an expert but with diminishing returns: on a day-to-day basis, my improvement is so minor, that I stop enjoying it. In fact, I start hating it.

For much of my life, this had been a curse. In the Internet Age, however, I believe my ever-a-generalist, never-a-specialist personality is a blessing. There are two reasons for this:
a) I'm working in a fast-changing environment, where rapid learning is the most important skill of all
b) Our networked world allows me to rapidly find and employ specialists as required, to help me complete the project at hand

It seems I am not the only person who realises that Renaissance Men are making a comeback:
On his blog, Tim Ferris lists The Top 5 Reasons to Be a Jack of All Trades.

In the comments on this post, I learned something that put a smile on my face, about that "master of none" quip I used to beat myself up about. Here's that saying in full:

Jack of all trades, master of none, though oft times better than master of one!