The rise of “Media 2.5”

As a journalist and editor of a several publications, I can no longer ignore the trend of this social media movement.

Previously, we had a clear distinction between mass media and personal blog media.

However, Twitter, Ustream and YouTube shortened the gap between “mass” and “personal”.

This is not the viral marketing.

Viral marketing is initialted by individuals.

When you pay attention to Twitter’s timeline, I could say that 1/3 to 1/5 of Twitter’s discussion is based on what mass media talks about.

So if all of mass media disappeared from this world, Twitter would become 1/3 to 1/5 less interesting.

I think it’s time to restructure the style of media..

And I shall call this “Media 2.5”

The rise of “Media (2.5)”

Traditionally, we only had mass media. Newspaper, Radio, and TV.

Even before the Internet, people start doing independent press, and create a small scale distribution. But especially since the Internet era, personal publishing became more accessible.

But mass media and personal media still had a clear distinction between.

People go to newspaper’s web site, and they just write about it on their web site.

Blog was still blog. You only talk about your personal opinion.

However, “API” (such as Facebook Connect, or Open ID) changed everything.

You can now log-in to any service using Facebook ID or Twitter account. (You can log-in to The Huffinton Post web site using Facebook).

Why is this the innovation?

Because this OpenID system is removing the boundry between mass media and personal media.

You can upload a video onto YouTube. But U2 is also using YouTube to showcase their live concert under the same umbrella. And users can now share the information via Twitter.

Traditionally, both news site and personal blog took long time to write an article. So it was not quick enough.

However, Twitter enable you to report something really quick. Yet, 140-word is not the long enough.

Therefore, the combination of Twitter, blog, and mass media would be the key players of next media.

The characterstics of new trends would be

• Combination of Timely, Personal and In-depth
• Timely = Twitter
• Personal = Blog
• In-depth = Mass media
• Each of media will associate each other