All bets are off, as the big players duke it out in the news industry

News Aggregation, in its purest form is crawling news headlines and presenting them for consumers to read through. In the past, this was a preserve of desktop news readers that consumers would down load from the internet and load RSS links to consume.

How far we have come in today's word

With the ever increasing move away from desktop-based data consumption to a more web-based setup, more and more people are striking the uninstall switch on their newsreader software! Subsequently, they are switching to online services like Google news and other systems that crawl the net 24 hours day every day, constantly collecting news, images, videos and other media for display on a centralized platform.
IN recent years, of course, as a reaction, the print media has tried to get in on the game by moving its operations to the net to counter the growing popularity of aggregators... not an effortless job because aggregators have the benefit of having multiple headlines from numerous sources..meaning the user has a digital one-stop superstore for reports and current affairs updates.

Enter the iPhone and the iPad…
As if there weren’t enough problems for the print media and desktop software…Steve Jobs decided to add to the heap and introduced the iPhone and iPad, and now, not only can news be accessed online by the use of laptop as well as PC…anyone with an iPhone, and in fact, any web-enabled cell mobile phone can read the latest items on the go!
In the near future, this writer can see news being delivered to glasses, spectacles, possibly even in 3-D! Or delivered to watches in a constant stream, possibly with geo-targeted news. Which actually brings to mind Twitter.

That new kid on the block has pretty much turned the business on its head. Now people, themselves, make the news and distribute and share in the ultimate newsreader: live updates..as they happen. If the past is anything to go by, twitter will grow and grow, and if opportunity favours it, we may just see the new model for information dissemination: decentralized, public and free.

Where will Google and the print media be then? Food for thought indeed

Article Source: http://gamblingarticlessite.com

P. Lawrence is a zimbabwe situation expert based in Harare

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