Home : Newsletters : 2005 : June
The latest internet trends are empowering internet users and shifting the balance of power away from large media organisations into the hands of individual web users. A great example of this is RSS - Really Simple Syndication. RSS is a system that allows for the easy sharing of information between organisations or internet users. On a practical level it allows internet users to act as web editors, picking and choosing which information they take from different websites and which information they ignore.
In order to use RSS it's first necessary to download an RSS Reader (software that essentially looks a little like Microsoft Outlook). Free RSS Readers can be downloaded from www.rssreader.com and www.feedreader.com - an excellent guide to doing this is available from CWJobs.co.uk. RSS works by allowing users to set up 'information feeds' from websites (in a similar way that job seekers can set up email alerts featuring relevant jobs from job boards). Once set up these information feeds regularly populate the RSS reader with the latest news stories and content as specified by the internet user. For example a user might choose to get business news from the Times Online, football news from the Guardian, the latest jobs from CWJobs and technology news from the Register. Once these feeds are set up the user no longer needs to visit all the different sites to read the desired content but instead can open the RSS reader and read what is effectively their own bespoke homepage.
Although only 5% of internet users in America are consuming their online news via RSS, an increased use of the new technology could have an impact on the way people use websites. RSS users now no longer need to navigate round a site (following a path set by the site owner) in order to get to the content they want to read and this could have an impact on the ability of advertisers to get their messages across to internet users.
Another development that enables consumers to act as editors is the increasing use of PVRs - Personal Video Recorders - of which SKY+ is the best known example. PVRs allow digital television viewers to record programmes directly onto a hard disk and use new functionality such as pausing and rewinding live television. Viewers can use the system to fast forward through sections of recorded programmes that they are not interested in - the biggest application of this is skipping through the advertisements. Recent research by Ipsos Media suggested that 90% of PVR viewers always or almost always fast forward through recorded advertisements and that almost 100% of viewers in the 16 - 34 age group fast forward through recorded ads. Currently only 6% of UK adults have a PVR in their household, but with the use of this new technology likely to increase TV advertisers face possible issues regarding getting their message across to viewers.
Another piece of the jigsaw that points to an increase in user control and allows all internet users to be journalists is the increasing popularity of Blogs. Blogs (abbreviated from Web logs) are personal online journals that allow individuals to communicate with a potentially massive audience. One of the first famous Blogs was written by Salam Pax and promoted by the Guardian during the Iraq war. Since then the number of Blogs have grown and sites such as Blogger and TypePad, where anyone can easily set up there own Blog, mean that internet users no longer have to rely on large media owners for news, but have direct access to news and the views of a diverse range of Bloggers. Two really useful Blogs for the online publishing industry are Simon Waldman's blog looking at the latest developments in online publishing (Simon is the Guardian's digital director) and Joel Cheesman's blog that focuses on online recruitment and search engine marketing.
Finally, the new online encyclopedia - Wikipedia - is a free online resource that anyone can edit. If you look up an entry on Wikipedia and don't agree with the content then you can log in and edit it! A great example of this working well was the information on Wikipedia about the recent London bombings - it appears that giving anyone the chance to edit published information leads to a sensible and useful consensus definition (rather than definitions being dominated by subjective views).
Put all of this stuff together and I think there's a significant trend in the way that we consume media. We can use RSS to edit our own content, PVRs to fast forward through TV ads, Blogs to share our views and sites like Wikipedia to define events. The impact that this could have on online recruitment isn't clear, but one thing is sure - the fragmentation of media that started with the proliferation of digital TV and radio channels is continuing and advertisers (both in the product and recruitment space) are going to need to think hard about how to get their message across to an increasingly media savvy audience.