Weighing in what’s Really Important –Not Blogs, Podcasts, RSS, or Email

Enjoyed this article by David Baker “The Future of E-Mail” is vice president of e-mail marketing and analytical solutions at Agency.com. He eleveates the conversation above the specific tools to see the real benefits. I was saying the same thing about blogs a few months ago, as I explain “Why blogs are not important”

Here’s a few key snippets from David: this is a great example of the integration of consumer and mass opinion integrating (and in some cases overtaking) enterprise created content. Companies and publishers that integrate will thrive.

“We hear a lot about blogs, but blogs aren’t important. What’s important is personal publishing, or the ability to communicate a message to a global audience almost instantaneously. Personal publishing will permeate electronic media, providing counterpoint to mainstream sources and adding depth and color to the conversation.”

Let’s not forget that it’s not only podcasts and TV but other relevent information from the web will also travel. Mobile devices will integrate, tie with cars and other transports and we’ll recieve trangulation of information across all these devices. (not to mention contextual information that ’s related to location)

“We hear a lot about podcasts, but podcasts aren’t important. What’s important is time-shifted media. The phenomenon that started with TiVo has spread to digital audio and will soon capture portable video. Information consumers will no longer be beholden to program schedules or even their living rooms. Our TV shows will travel with us.”

RSS can be more than just a subscription type service, it can also be used as protocol to link archaic systems together and synthesize new ones. We’re already starting to see this happen in Enterprise Intranets where systems don’t talk to each other. As it evolves to Microformats we’ll start to see very detailed data types using RSS –this is just the start.

“We hear a lot about RSS, but RSS isn’t important. What’s important is the ability to subscribe to information that really interests us. RSS is mainly used to subscribe to blog posts and podcasts. But in the future, they will use it to subscribe to ideas.”

Email is not dying (but I do see a lot of overuses and excess) so we’ll have to see how it morphs. David says the following:

“I conclude that we hear a lot about e-mail, but e-mail isn’t important. What’s important is our ability to communicate in a synchronous and asynchronous fashion in a mixed media world.”

There are other types of communication tools we’ll also need to watch such as Instant Messenger, Second Life and whatever comes next.

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 31st, 2006 at 6:56 am and is filed under Social Media, Web Advertising, Web Marketing, Web Theory. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.