Simon Caulkin in the Observer on innovation and media:
Take the rise of the bloggers. This is no simple accident of technology, but the price newspapers are paying for having treated readers as passive consumers without bothering to find out more about them as news users. In the same way, artificial TV reality shows are being challenged by the mushrooming growth of permanent reality spaces like YouTube, MySpace, Etribes and others, and 3D virtual-reality sites such as Second Life.
No one knows where these trends will end. Of course, traditional media companies are pitching in to buy up anything with Web 2.0 pretensions, however remote. But as the AOL-Time Life debacle graphically showed, there is no necessary synergy between old and new media, and unless attitudes to customers change radically, they may find that the benefits of innovation are not easily bought.
