Dispatches from digital land

Guy Berger, writing in The Mail & Guardian Online (the first internet-based news publication in Africa), has a great recap of the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Texas and the not-so-festive state of the traditional news business.

He does a yeomen's job of weaving all the trends in and says mainstream media still hasn't grasped:

• The blogging-style practice where, instead of acting as a centralised publisher, the trend is to republish on other sites as much as possible (using technologies termed widgets). (Exception: the BBC is at the forefront of this).
  
• The way that traditional mass media are losing their monopoly on providing comment and analysis. Those experts who were called on for this in the past are now increasingly doing their own thing via the inter-linked blogosphere.
  
• Media reviews and recommendations are being supplanted by the social networking of Web 2.0 where online communities rate the best music, movies and much more.
  
• The fact that blogging -- with its free keyword tags, generosity of hyperlinks and commentability -- is providing a far richer informational experience than most mass-media sites.

Good reading! And Ken Riddick and Julie Webber quoted, too. Ah, right.

(Heard about the piece from a bloggersblog post on Twitter).

Tags: media | newspapers | interactive media