For the last three-four months, I have been working hard behind the scenes at my internship consulting on our blog design and creating some of our web pages. Meghan M. Biro and Lisa Simons were the other brains behind the operation.

We’ve assembled a talented community of contributors from all over the country. We’ve got start-up experts, hiring pros, resume writers, HR marketers, college students, fresh graduates and everyone in between. We’ll be blogging, podcasting, posting videos and making multimedia content centered around a variety of topics: Careers, Culture, Digital Media, Green and Sustainability, Innovation.

Now, all of our hard work is public. Check us out. Subscribe to our RSS feed. Read my first post “Treat Your Job Search like a PR Campaign.” I’m so excited for this opportunity to contribute to the community and enhance my personal brand!

Correct
Judging by the current trends—and online media has changed a lot since this video came out—let’s take a look at what it got right.

Newsbotster – Although it hasn’t grown into the massive media force the video predicted, the idea that news is social and what your friends care about has certainly been adopted in the past couple of years. Facebook’s Newsfeed is essentially….well, news! The video says, “News is more relevant than ever before.”

Amazon – The video labels Amazon as “the standard for internet sales” and it continues hold that status mostly because of the personalized recommendations the site encourages. Chris Anderson’s 2009 book “The Long Tail” constantly cites Amazon as an example of how unlimited shelf space eliminates scarcity and reshapes our ideas about the economics of supply and demand.

Personalization – The video refers many times to how influential the element of personalized media is. RSS and Twitter feeds dominate our online experience. To use a personal example: I don’t have cable; I get just about all of my news from my Google Reader account by subscribing to blogs, podcasts and RSS feeds.

Mobility – The end of the video touches briefly on how personalized media will become mobile. This bit is coming true to a much larger extent. The iPhone and BlackBerry have changed they way we think about phones. There are now pocket laptops capable of just about anything. We can now consumer just about any kind of media anywhere we go, says Edelman’s Steve Rubel in a recent blog post.

Incorrect
Tradiational media organizations are an “afterthought” – Not so! With the increasing number of bloggers and Twitterers disseminating information online, traditional media organizations will serve as a fact check. Blogs are, as David Meerman Scott says, the voices in the barroom. The opinions they express should be given no more credibility than would a stranger’s in a bar. Traditional media organizations are necessary for truth, and they must keep that in mind as they struggle to survive in the free-information online world.

No monopolies – Here is where, I think, the video goes entirely askew. Combining Google and Amazon may be a possibility, but there will always be competition among online media organizations. The spirit of competition and free enterprise that built this country will once again come into play in the digital world. Take a look at what Apple is doing allowing third-party developers to use the same software its developers use to make iPhone apps.

“Much of consumer created content is untrue” – The average Britannica page contains 3 errors, while the average Wikipedia page contains only 4. Is consumer-created content really “much” less reputable?

Finally, the video misses how much of media today is socially driven. We are constantly connected not only to information through media but information and people through media.

I’d like to see what The Museum of Media History would put in a video today considering the emergence of sites like Facebook Marketplace and Twitter. It’s almost impossible to predict accurately the future of online media, because by the time you finish a prediction, the future is already here and changing.

Every Sparknotes page has a box featuring articles aimed at distracting students. Each article has a catchy and occasionally controversial title such as “You Kiss Your Mother with that Mouth?” and “Pregnant with Syphilis at 14: Thanks a lot abstinence-only education” Don’t lie: you would have clicked too.
The articles, similar to blog entries, each tell a witty anecdote or highlight an issue. They have cartoons as well.
First I was puzzled: why would any site would want to distract its users away from the reason they visited the site in the first place? Then it hit me. Sparknotes.com has implemented a brilliant self-promotion/new media marketing strategy that causes its users to spend more time and clicks on their site (increasing ad rates) while giving them a chance to spread entertaining material by Sparknotes around the social media scene with a “Share this” widget.
Here’s why I think their idea is brilliant: I had the privilege last week of hearing Mike Volpe of Internet Inbound Marketing company Hubspot, speak on the internet transforming the landscape of marketing. In ablog post, Volpe writes:
“Fewer people are going to tradeshows, direct mail response rates are decreasing, email marketing is becoming less effective, and cold calling is becoming more difficult. People have more tools for blocking out this interruption marketing (spam filters, caller ID) and even governments are helping customers block this marketing (CAN Spam Act, National Do Not Call lists).”
At first glance, the box looks like an advertisement, so, my first impulse was to ignore it, to block it out. But seeing I was being offered the choice to distract myself, I in no way felt my life was being interrupted. I, the consumer, was in control. By granting this power to me, Sparknotes made me more willing to accept their invitation to read their content, talk about it, and spread it around to others. They effectively increase the power of their brand and draw visitors, who may have no intention to read literature summaries, to their material.
Pretty smart, Sparknotes, pretty smart.