Posted on 12/19/2002 6:04:45 PM PST by BellStar
TOP WEB STORIES & TECH TRENDS TO WATCH
Webby founder reloads with Net trends for '03
As the year comes to a close, it seems as good a time as any to sum up the Internet trends of 2002 and forecast what's to come next year.
For this exercise, we've enlisted Tiffany Shlain, director and founder of the Webby Awards, which has managed to earn itself the reputation of being (sort of) the Academy Awards for the Internet.
Shlain's accomplishment in the online space, in fact, earned her a spot on last year's Newsweek list of "Women of the 21st Century."
She lists seven hot developments we saw this year:
o Spam increased fivefold compared with the previous year. "Spam is choking e-mail. There needs to be a revolt," she says. Some lawmakers agree. In California, for example, proposed legislation will make it tougher to spam and easier for consumers to get their names off of spammers' lists.
o The continuation of a trend whereby Americans rely less on TV and more on the Internet to get important news, such as they did en masse this year while seeking information about the Beltway sniper.
o Music wars raged on. Nothing new here. The Internet allows lots of people to trade music; the industry complains; lawsuits are filed.
o Games go (nearly) mainstream. PlayStation 2 and XBox let users compete like they've never been able to before. "Sims Online" will keep the momentum going.
o Blogging got big this year, and it now plays a small but growing role in politics, media and entertainment. A blog, by the way, is short for Web log, a kind of online chronological and frequently updated publication of the blogger's thoughts. About 41,000 people launch their own blog each month, and some boast impressive traffic.
o Instant messaging isn't just for kids anymore; it's the preferred method of communication in the business world.
o And, Shlain says, the leather-bound photo album faced serious competition from digital photos, which offer "a whole new form of sharing images and memories."
Beyond a showdown on spam, Shlain identifies a host of other trends to watch next year:
o Already popular in Japan, look for "proximity dating" in the states. About 34 million Americans allegedly have used an online dating service, Shlain says. Proximity dating is a service that alerts online daters via their cell phones whenever someone with a matching profile is nearby.
o Wireless Internet access will get popular in public parks, libraries, schools and local coffeehouse, like the Starbucks across the street from The Hollywood Reporter, for example.
o Hollywood will offer up big films to Movielink, the Internet movies-on-demand initiative from five major studios.
o Look for videophones to take off, allowing callers to see each other as they chat.
o And, Shlain says, Internet surfers should expect less of their favorite content to be free. Sites will need to rely on a combination of ads and either subscriptions or tiny per-item payments in order to become profitable. By next year or 2004, more high-tech solutions will emerge for making such content-on-demand payments almost invisible to users -- until they see such charges on their credit cards, that is. That's a scenario that Internet users will embrace -- though not quite as enthusiastically as they have embraced free content
Good to know.
Don't tell JR.
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