Social media is widely felt to be a disruptive technology – which is to say, a technology that alters a market in unexpected and not very predictable ways and one that has particular implications for publishing. However, a truthful answer to the question posed in our title if we take it to mean ‘how disruptive is social media to publishing now’, is probably very different depending on where in the industry you sit.
At the extreme end of things, the rise of blogging, Twitter et al is causing many newspaper publishers to question and in some cases modify their customer proposition. Meanwhile, trade publishers, who have a similarly direct exposure to the rapid upheavals in the consumer market driven in part by social media use, are more likely to complain about the latest outrage perpetrated by their new and unwelcome gatekeepers, Google/Apple/Amazon than to worry about social media per se. This is certainly disruption but feels more like a spat between big old companies and big new companies.
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Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to mark the end of an era. I’m talking about the passing of Web 3.0 – ostensibly the era of the next great revolution in the information industry.
In its short life the semantic web we knew so little passed through the peak of inflated expectation, went round the cape of unrealistic ambition and finally found a resting place in the great junkyard of unwanted technology in the virtual cloud. At one time our information industry seemed to have the most to gain (or lose) from the threats and opportunities presented by our recently lost friend. So, what went wrong? Continue reading