Escaping the Internet Commodity Trap

by Rowan Gibson

The Internet is like a black hole that relentlessly sucks in, digitizes and democratizes content of every kind. While that may be generally good news for consumers (hey, look at all the great stuff we can now get for free), it has turned out to be unbelievably bad news for the content providers. Ask anyone in the print media business, or the music business, or the movie business. For at least the last decade, industries that primarily produce content have been struggling hard to find a viable new financial model in a world where internet users (particularly the young generation) don't expect to pay for anything they read, listen to, or watch. As one popular mantra puts it: "Content is no longer king". The fact is, content distribution is now king. Power has shifted to the content aggregators - think Google, YouTube, Digg.com or iTunes - and to new media platforms like Amazon's Kindle reader or the Apple iPad. So how exactly are content providers supposed to make money in an era of rampant digital commoditization? The only option they have left is to innovate like never before; to reinvent their industry business models before they become obsolete.

I remember talking to Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired magazine, back in 1995 about the future of the Web. He told me he viewed the Internet as a "planetary-sized copying machine" and added that "trying to stop copying on the Net is impossible." Indeed, within a week of my latest book "Innovation to the Core" being published in Chinese, there were at least two websites in China offering a digital version of the book for illegal download. Consumers clearly win - why buy the physical book when you can get the digital file for free? But in terms of book sales and royalties, the author (i.e. me!) and the publishers lose out entirely.

That's why the book publishing industry is feverishly exploring a variety of new business models. One option is to sell eBooks direct to customers, cutting out middlemen like distributors and retailers, and building a community around the books and authors. Since eBooks have a relatively low price tag, the hope is that consumers will be willing to pay for the genuine article (a la iTunes) rather than download an illegal copy, especially if it comes with social-media-enabled tools that help them discuss and share the book with others. Another option is to make the eBook itself a richer multimedia experience (with audio, video, hyperlinks and so forth) rather than just a text-based medium. Instead of embedding all of these media in a single digital file (which would still be relatively easy to copy and distribute illegally), publishers could give consumers a code when they purchase the book that offers exclusive access to a dynamic, integrated online application environment.

A similar challenge faces today's music business. Over the last decade, music labels, retailers, and the artists themselves have seen their revenues fall off a cliff in an era when teenagers can - and do - get all the music they want for free. Last year, 95% of music downloads were still from illegal file-sharing sites. And although Apple is now the world's biggest music retailer, its iTunes store has never been a massive revenue producer. Instead, it simply serves as a provider of low-cost content for the iPod, helping to drive sales of Apple's premium-priced music player. So far, the latest trend - cloud-based, streaming music sites like Spotify, Rhapsody and Pandora - has not been very helpful to the music industry either. Until now, these sites have employed a free-to-users, ad-supported model which doesn't generate much money for the labels or the artists. As an example, it's estimated that a million plays of Lady Gaga's popular song "Poker Face" on Spotify only earned her a paltry $167.

Frankly, I'm not too worried about the artists because most of them make their money these days on concert revenue and merchandising, not on the sale of recordings. And since people go to live concerts to hear artists performing songs they already know, it's actually in the artists' interests to have their music distributed as widely as possible, even if it's for free, in order to generate a lot of fans. Yet what about the music labels? How can they possibly compete against free downloads? Only by finding innovative new ways to add value. That's what MusicDNA is all about. It's a new digital file format that contains not just music but additional content such as lyrics, images and interesting info like interviews, tour schedules, or updates to the artists' social network pages. Anyone who downloads the file illegally would miss out on all these extras. So MusicDNA offers hope that the industry can open up new revenue streams. It may also point the way forward for Hollywood studios as they look for ways to battle illegal movie downloads.

Another victim of the Internet commodity trap has been the traditional news media industry. According to a new survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, more Americans now get their news from the Internet than from newspapers, and three-fourths say they primarily learn of news via updates on social media sites like Twitter. So as readers (closely followed by advertisers) make a mass exodus from print to digital media, 'The Press' as we know it seems to be going the way of the dinosaur. In the face of mounting bankruptcies, mass layoffs and plunging advertising sales, some publishers have already thrown in the towel. As an example, McGraw-Hill recently signaled their despair by selling off BusinessWeek at the bargain basement price of less than $5 million.

So is there any hope for this ailing industry? Some think it might still be possible to go back to the old 'paid content' model. Rupert Murdoch, illustrious media mogul of News Corporation, has been making headlines over the last year with his plans to erect a pay wall around his media. And, if it works, others will almost certainly follow. An analogy could be the advent of cable TV in the 1960s and 1970s. At first, very few believed that anyone would be willing to actually pay for TV shows and movies after spending decades watching them for free. But today the average household in North America pays about $50 a month for Pay-TV, so why shouldn't the same principle work for the Internet? There is also new hope on the horizon in the form of emerging digital media platforms like Kindle and Apple iPad, that promise to bring fresh revenues to the news industry by charging readers to access publications in an exciting new way.

Gordon Crovitz, former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, has co-founded a company called Journalism Online to help newspapers find new payment models. These range from micropayments - where readers pay for individual stories - to "freemium" models like the one used by the Financial Times, where readers can view 10 free pages every 30 days.

One of Rupert Murdoch's properties, The Wall Street Journal already charges readers US$119 a year for an online subscription. The WSJ is also experimenting with a new kind of media mix that takes it beyond the written word. Last September, its Digital Group rolled out News Hub, a twice-daily video news series. In January The Wall Street Journal Network delivered a record 5.5 million streams, with about a million or so views being generated by News Hub. This February the group launched Digits, a video series focused on technology which streams live each weekday, and plans are now in the works for several other original live series.

As whole industries see their traditional business models sucked into the Internet commodity trap, their only hope of escape has become radical innovation. For content providers of every stripe, success and survival in the future will be based on the ability to fundamentally rethink, re-imagine and reinvent themselves by innovating around who they serve, what they provide, how they provide it, how they make money, and how they differentiate from the rest. Stewart Brand's maxim may have famously stated that "information wants to be free", which is at the heart of utopian Internet democracy, but the cold reality is that every business has to make money. That means that whether you produce books, newspapers, magazines, music, movies or TV shows, somebody somewhere has to pay somehow. Figuring out who that could be - and how the financial model would work - is one the greatest business battles of our age.


Related Articles - "Content is No Longer King" - Part 1 - Part 2 - by Stephen Shapiro


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Rowan Gibson is widely recognized as one of the world's leading experts on enterprise innovation. He is co-author of the bestseller "Innovation to the Core" and a much in-demand public speaker around the globe. On Twitter he is @RowanGibson.

A world without newspapers?

by Adam Hartung

We're rapidly becoming a quick-communication world. 140 characters is all we get on Twitter, and it's becoming the new "elevator pitch." Communication has moved from letters and phone calls to texting and Facebook. What we write, and say, is getting shorter. Book sales have declined for 4 years, and magazines are rapidly becoming an historical artifact. We rely on bloggers to read, digest, reformat and inform us quickly about what we want to know.

But, behind this, there has to be real fact gathering. Somebody has to report information as it happens, and dispense it. In many countries this was done by the government. But in the modern world we've relied on newspapers, and the wire feed services (AP, UPI, Reuters) that supply newspapers, to give us a lot of the raw news. Newspapers used ad revenue to pay for news acquisition, and they delivered the stream every morning.

But now, due to internet competition, newspapers are running out of cash. As people turn to the web for instant information advertisers have dropped newspapers. Subscriptions have fallen. And several newspaper companies, such as Tribune Corporation, have filed for bankruptcy. Many towns are at risk of losing the daily newspaper altogether. And employment has dropped to 1950's levels



So, what will be the prime source for information? Where will bloggers, and tweeters and web sites get the news if the newspapers disappear? Who is going to pay for field reporters, investigative reporters and correspondents in places far away - or dangerous like wars. The public has already bemoaned the lack of "news" in television news - which is more about pictures than news. And nowadays television news is dominated by opinion programs like "Countdown" or "The O'Reilly Factor."

It's clear that people want their information digitally - and mostly from the web. It's also clear that advertisers are drawn to the web with its far lower ad rates and specific, trackable ad placement. But what's unclear is where original news content will be created when the newspaper companies disappear. Even the most successful news web sites (Marketwatch.com and HuffingtonPost.com, as examples) depend largely upon information supplied them from wire feeds and newspaper sources for content.

A free society depends upon access to information. And nowhere is access more available than the USA. But unless there is some serious innovation in publishing, the system is at risk of collapse. Opinions will be as available as air, but if the original news sources dry up - what will everyone talk about? How will people - investors, voters, parents, politicians and others - obtain original information to become informed? Understanding what will replace the newspaper industry as a source of original news content is a difficult question to answer.

What will be the innovation that will keep the river of original, real time news flowing? In 2020, how will we be able to obtain information we can trust for accuracy?

The "media" industry is in big trouble. Large players, like News Corp., have seen profits decline - despite acquisitions like MySpace.com. GE recently agreed to sell NBC/Universal for less than it cost to create. But so far, few have figured out how make a profit from digital media as the market transitions away from print and television. While web sites proliferate, they produce less than 1/10th the revenue of old media.

Without some serious innovation, our news could soon be long on quantity - and very short on quality.


Editors Note: Apologies all around. This article from Adam Hartung was orignally supposed to be part of January's Innovation Perspectives, but I misplaced it. I hope you still enjoy it.


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Adam Hartung, author of "Create Marketplace Disruption", is a Faculty and Board member of the Lake Forest Graduate School of Management, Managing Partner of Spark Partners, and writes for "Forbes" and the "Journal for Innovation Science."

Internet Future Driven by User Reputation Scores

by Hutch Carpenter

In a recent interview with EMC's Stu Miniman about the future of the web, I predicted that in 20 years, we'll all have online reputation scores. Little badges, numbers that communicate our level of authority, this sort of thing. And these reputations will have tangible impact.

Three different trends come together at some point in the future to make this happen. These trends have been underway for a while, but come together at some tipping point in the years ahead. Here's a visualization of the trends:


It's helpful to discuss each one, in the context of online reputations.


Rate performance of businesses

eBay, which went public back in 1998, played an important role in socializing the concept of people providing online ratings for online sellers. After we receive our purchase, we rate the seller. The collective wisdom identifies top sellers. Got your eye in that Donkey Kong game? Who are you most likely to trust...?


Amazon picked up on this, once it introduced third party sellers into the mix. You can see the percentage of positive ratings for the different sellers. Personally, I have paid premiums (i.e. higher prices) for the assurance that comes from a higher rated seller.

Yelp has taken this concept of rating a seller, and applied to offline consumer experiences. Want to get a burrito in San Francisco? You're likely to go with the highest rated restaurants.

These ratings make up for our lack of information about various providers of services. One could do a lot of online research, and asking friends, before buying. But these ratings do quite well as shorthand ways of assessing quality. They've made it easy to transact, without knowing someone ahead of time.

The rating ethos is expanding. On Facebook, you can 'like' people's entries. We 'love' music on Last.fm. We 'favorite' tweets. We 'digg' and 'buzz up' stories. Implicitly, we provide ratings when we share content via different social networks. Online engagement allows for this.


Migration of transparent work and information online

I found this recent Kaiser Family Foundation study fascinating. The amount of time kids spend online - smart phone, computer, television or other electronic device - is now at an all-time high. There's no denying this: future workers are going to be more accustomed to online engagement and information-seeking than any generation before. It's their lifestyle:


More generally, an important distinction from the web of the 1990s and early 2000s is that we aren't just reading and transacting. Individuals are providing the content. More every day, in fact. We have transferred some of the engagement and contributions from the offline world online. Actually, we're probably creating more content than we ever have,

For workers, the growth of Enterprise 2.0 continues. A key outcome of that? More and more work is making its way online. When it's available there, and not just in a Word document on the hard drive or email in an inbox, it's findable and usable by everyone. Your colleagues know quite well what the quality of your work and contributions are.

Do you think all of this stops, and we go back to message-relaying marathoners, smoke signals and carrier pigeons? No. Enterprise 2.0 and social media will continue their growth apace. And increasingly, this time spent online is through social media.

More and more people will be publishing their work, their ideas, their knowledge, their conversational bits, their creativity... online. It's just going to keep increasing.


Rely on social media for information

An emerging trend is the transition of where we seek information. Remember libraries, magazines and microfiche? Then the 1.0 websites where we got information? Then the portals that aggregated information from major media sites? Then search augmented all this information consumption?

Well, the next wave is to rely on our social connections to deliver interesting, relevant information to us. As was famously said by a college student in 2008:


"If the news is important, it will find me."


A recent Nielsen study confirms this growing tendency to use social media as a first stop to find information:


Admittedly, the leading social sites of today - blogs, Facebook, Twitter - have a ways to go before they become a large percentage of the population's first choice. And it'd help if Twitter could get their search working further back than a week or two.

But this survey and anecdotal evidence points toward an increased reliance on others to provide information to us.


Putting this all together

It's that last trend, still early in its cycle, that really points toward the development of formal, online reputations. When we started transacting online with complete strangers or small businesses we never knew, we needed a basis for understanding their credibility. It turns out, crowdsourced ratings are excellent indicators of quality. It also causes small businesses to be aware of the quality of their products and services.

In the years ahead, expect increased usage of social media for getting information and sourcing people, products and services. As an example, research firm IDC just released these survey results:


"57% of U.S. workers use social media for business purposes at least once per week. The number one reason cited by U.S. workers for using social tools for business purposes was to acquire knowledge and ask questions from a community."


As reliance on people for information increases, expect an increased need for knowing which strangers provide the top quality information. Note I said "strangers" there. One thing we will continue to do is to rely on our "friends" (social media sense of the word) for ongoing daily information. The people we connect with on the various social sites.

But that's the only way we will get information. Or make decisions. Great case in point? Google's real-time search results:


If innovation is the focus of your work, wouldn't you want to be included in those Google results? Here's the thing. Google doesn't just put any old tweet or other form of real-time content in there. As Google's Amit Singhal stated:


"You earn reputation, and then you give reputation. If lots of people follow you, and then you follow someone - then even though this [new person] does not have lots of followers, his tweet is deemed valuable because his followers are themselves followed widely," Singhal says. "It is definitely, definitely more than a popularity contest," he adds.


Note his words: "You earn reputation."

PR agency Edelman created a ranking algorithm called Tweetlevel, which analyzes people on the basis of influence, popularity, engagement and trust. Tweetlevel was recently used to create a list of the top analysts on Twitter. As the author of that post noted, one purpose for the list was to answer the question: "Should they spend their limited time interacting with analysts via twitter?" Presumably if you're an analyst in the Top 50, 'yes'.

Again, reputation being used for a defined purpose.

Ross Dawson wrote a good piece about the changes coming due to the increasing visibility of "people's actions and character." He notes the impact of reputation on seeking professionals for work:


"Many professionals will be greatly impacted by these shifts. The search for professional advice is often still highly unstructured, based on anecdotal recommendations or simple searches. As importantly, clients of large professional firms may start to be more selective on who they wish to work with at the firm, creating a more streamlined meritocracy.

The mechanisms for measuring professional reputation are still very crude, yet over the coming decade we can expect to see substantial changes in how professionals are found. This will impact many facets of the industry."


And Bertrand Dupperin sees a similar dynamic playing out internally:


"Use internal social networks to build a kind of marketplace that would put work capacity and competence on a given subject in relation with needs and allow those who can apply for an assignment instead of blind assignments to those who can't."


In a world where individuals emerge as important sources of information, products and services, people will need a way to break through the limited knowledge they'll have on any one person. Look for online reputations to emerge as a way to fill that gap.


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Hutch Carpenter is the Vice President of Product at Spigit. Spigit integrates social collaboration tools into a SaaS enterprise idea management platform used by global Fortune 2000 firms to drive innovation.

eBay France Tackles Challenger Head-on

by Yann Cramer

Visit eBay.fr and next to the traditional eBay homepage building blocks you will see a map of France that you can browse regionally to find local ads from sellers close to your home. If you fancy something, you can then contact and meet the seller face-to-face to see the item and agree a price. This looks completely at odds with eBay's core values of driving price transparency through online auctions and virtually connecting buyers and sellers across the global village. Are eBay prototyping a new offering? Not quite. Actually, they are merely reacting to an unexpectedly powerful local threat.


What happened?

Three years ago leboncoin.fr was created after observing that, while enjoying the online access to the dozens of offers that eBay can display for any given item search, a large number of customers would prefer to physically see and try the item before buying. The start-up made the bold assumption that there is enough truly local just-round-the-corner offer to continue meet the customer's appetite for choice while addressing the need to see the item and meet the seller. In some respect it was an old idea: local free-ad newspapers have existed for decades. Leboncoin used the associating skill of making old with new to connect that old idea with the power of online technology.

Today it boasts 9 million free ads on its website and over 2 million daily visits. Google Trends rank them above eBay.fr who have felt compelled to react by copying what they see as a potentially disruptive innovation in a field they themselves disrupted more than 10 years ago to become the dominant player.

Of course the threat is only local at this time and eBay as a global coorporation remains immensely more powerful. But leboncoin.fr business model could be replicated in any country to become a major headache for eBay.


What next then?

eBay may well end up buying leboncoin.fr but it cannot kill a business model that others could then easily resurrect to meet what appears to be a genuine customer need for proximity.

So, it may turn out that - even if they did not come up with the idea - eBay.fr copying of leboncoin.fr is some sort of rapid prototyping of a business model that we will see eBay roll out globally in the months to come.


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Yann Cramer is an innovation learner, practitioner, sharer, teacher. He's lived in France, Belgium and the UK, he's travelled six continents to create development opportunities with customers or suppliers, and run workshops on R&D and Marketing. He writes on www.innovToday.com and on twitter @innovToday.

Creative Destruction and Newspapers

by Steve McKee

I love reading the newspaper. I like the feel of the broadsheet in my hand, the anticipation of turning each page to see what's next, and the sense I get of being plugged into the world through the rhythm of daily reading. I am a newspaper loyalist, and I'm an endangered species.

That, of course, is not news. Newspapers are shrinking and their circulation shriveling, like a mirror reflecting the Internet's growth and expansion. Politicians and pundits (including many newspaper editors and publishers) who aren't schooled in business don't recognize the absolute and inescapable law of creative destruction. They wring their hands as if what's happening is a tragic thing. I see it simply as the way of the world.

To a news consumer, the Internet offers many advantages over ink and paper, from timeliness to portability, affordability to dialogue. And for a generation of readers spawned in the wake of the Web, getting their news online is not only better than in print, it's more natural. Even old guys like me who love the sound of the thump on the driveway in the morning increasingly turn to our Macs and Blackberrys to keep up with breaking events.

But while the Internet is rapidly replacing ink, paper and newsstands, the Web is to news as an aluminum can is to Coke - a terrific way to deliver the product but not the source of its value. Newspapers are struggling because newspapers are confused - they forgot they were in the business of building an audience and focused instead on selling the audience (to the advertisers who increasingly bore their cost of operating). That was fine as long as they had a monopoly on distribution, but it led them to spend their limited resources on adding more ink colors rather than more color to their ink. Now that advertisers have (ultimately) infinitely more choices, newspapers are stuck.

But the answer isn't so difficult. The key to the future of the newspaper industry lies in its past. There will always be a market for news, and newspapers still have core competencies in gathering, reporting and interpreting what's important to their readers. If they do their job well, they'll continue to be able to provide the exclusive content for which readers will pay, regardless of whether or not it results in ink-stained fingers.

The more the newspaper industry focuses on 'news' rather than 'paper', the better off it (and we) will be. That will enable it to embrace evolving distribution opportunities and find new sources of revenue and competitive advantage. Just like every other industry must do.

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Steve McKee is a BusinessWeek.com columnist, marketing consultant, and author of "When Growth Stalls: How it Happens, Why You're Stuck, and What To Do About It." Learn more about him at www.WhenGrowthStalls.com and at http://twitter.com/whengrowthstall.

Twitter vs. Online Forums - Tragedy of the Commons

by Hutch Carpenter

Riding on board a Virgin America flight, I have CNN on my seat media screen. I'm watching CNN much more than I'm usually able to.

I notice those tweets flashing along the bottom of the screen. Some are good. Many aren't. They are examples of the tendency for online discussions to devolve into name calling, stereotypes and ad hominem attacks.

They remind of the worst sort of comments found on online message boards. The problem with inline message boards is that there is little control by the individual for what they see. It's not just political discussions. Marketers pollute LinkedIn message boards with their spammy webinar solicitations.

It's the tragedy of the commons. A common resource - message boards - is overrun by those not providing quality contributions.

With Twitter's one-way subscribe model, this particular attack on the commons is limited. Why? It's easy to unfollow those who post irrelevant or non-productive things.

Want to be a participant beyond the amen chorus and fellow polemicists, or get people to actually care about your webinar? Figure out how to engage in an intelligent discussion.

A benefit of Twitter: managing the tragedy of the commons. It should be noted, however, that enabling discussions among multiple people is quite important. Letting multiple people on a thread while preventing the spammers is the next step in protecting and improving the value of the commons.

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Hutch Carpenter is the Director of Marketing at Spigit. Spigit integrates social collaboration tools into a SaaS enterprise idea management platform used by global Fortune 2000 firms to drive innovation.

An Internet Innovation

by Drew Boyd

Imagine a Web site that detects a visitor's "thinking" style and "morphs" its look and feel to suit that visitor's style? Professor Glen Urban and his colleagues at M.I.T. describe an approach in the Sloan Management Review article, "Morph the Web To Build Empathy, Trust and Sales."

They collaborated with BT Group, a UK telecom company, to create a Web site that learns whether a person is more analytical versus holistic, and whether the person is more visual versus verbal in how they process information. Once the Web site learns this (based on a few preliminary clicks on the site), it adapts itself to present information in an optimal way:



This is an excellent example of the Attribute Dependency Template, one of five templates in the Systematic Inventive Thinking method of innovation. Attribute Dependency takes internal and external attributes of a product or service and combines them to create new dependencies (or break existing dependencies). With Web site morphing, for example, the two attributes that have been linked are:

• Web site appearance (an internal attribute)


• Visitor's Cognitive Style (an external attribute)

Dependencies can be passive, active, or adaptive. Passive dependencies are static - they don't change once they have been established. Active dependencies are dynamic - an attribute changes only when another one changes. Adaptive dependencies change the way they change. In other words, they learn as they go. Attribute Dependency is a great tool for creating "smart" products - those that know and adapt to user preferences or environmental conditions.

Does Web site morphing work? The MIT researchers report that Web-originated purchase intentions for BT's broadband service could increase 20% after morphing the site to match individual cognitive styles.

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Drew Boyd is Director of Marketing Mastery for Johnson & Johnson (Ethicon Endo-Surgery division). He is also Visiting Assistant Professor of Marketing and Innovation at the University of Cincinnati and Executive Director of the MS-Marketing program. Follow him at www.innovationinpractice.com and at http://twitter.com/drewboyd

Social Media and Music - Ideal Partners?

Quiet Company - "It's Better To Spend Money Like There's No Tomorrow Than Spend Tonight Like There's No Money"

I recently became aware of TheSixtyOne, an online music community where "artists upload their work for review, but, rather than allow a stuffy suit in a boardroom to decide what's good, thousands of listeners do." Since I canceled my Last.fm account after they handed user data to the RIAA, I've found TheSixtyOne to be the best way to learn about new bands that you otherwise wouldn't hear about.

One band I've gotten into from TheSixtyOne is Quiet Company from Austin, TX. Their music is a kind of wonderful, melodic piano-pop with lyrics that are optimistic without feeling cheesy. With songs like "It's Better To Spend Money Like There's No Tomorrow Than Spend Tonight Like There's No Money" (above), you know they're not taking themselves too seriously.

After playing the track list multiple times, I just HAD to share them with my Twitter stream. The best way to share music on Twitter is Blip.fm. I searched, found the song, and sent this:

That was the last I thought of it, until this morning. When I opened TweetDeck, I found this reply from @quietcompanytx:

They followed up with another tweet saying I could share that link with anyone I think would like their music, so here you go.

I downloaded the sampler, happy to get free music, and played the three songs about four times over.

Then something funny happened.

I went to the Quiet Company site, and bought & downloaded their newest album, "Everyone You Love Will Be Happy Soon", directly from the band.

What's so funny about that? I almost never buy new music. With the plethora of online music sites - from Last.fm to Pandora, to Blip.fm to TheSixtyOne and more - I can stream just about anything I want. For free.

But because Quiet Company used the tools of the internet - first, to showcase their music; then, to find and reach out to those talking about it - they were able to gain a new fan, turn that fan into an evangelist, and see a return on the time and effort they've spent.

This isn't something that only applies to music. Whether you're a band, a business, or a nonprofit, how can you excite people with your offerings? How can you benefit from listening to online conversations and engaging with those that are talking about your product or service?

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Gradon Tripp is the founder of Social Media for Social Change, an organization that uses the tools of online media to raise awareness for nonprofits. He writes about ways organizations -- both non-profit and for-profit -- can benefit from using social media at GradonTripp.com.

Celebrating 20 Years of the Internet

To celebrate the twenty year anniversary of the Internet, here is a video of Tim Berners-Lee talking about the birth of the Internet and where things may go from here.

For his next project, he's building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, and video - to unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together.

Check it out:



What do you think the future of the web holds?
(please add a comment)

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