Congratulations to the entire RWW team, they collectively author one of the best new media sites covering technology. Sean Ammirati was over to our house for dinner on Saturday night and we were talking about the evolution of blogs to fully featured new media sites, RWW being a great example of this.
What is interesting is how the professional blogs have evolved into full featured media sites while also developing personalities that differentiate them from competitive sites. Take RWW, GigaOm, and TechCrunch as 3 very good examples of well differentiated sites that deliver not just the latest news but in their own unique way substantive coverage of the bigger trends that impact our business. I have come to really appreciate RWW’s approach, which is more essay driven than drive by, less breaking news and more what does the news mean.
I’m tempted to say that we are witnessing a rebirthing of media but the fact remains that new media is a lot like old media in terms of business model, new media is just a lot more efficient.
On 20 April, 2003, ReadWriteWeb was born. My first post here was appropriately entitled The Read/Write Web and it began: “The World Wide Web in 2003 is beginning to fulfil the hopes that Tim Berners-Lee had for it over 10 years ago when he created it.” At the time I started ReadWriteWeb, web 2.0 hadn’t yet been invented, Google Adsense hadn’t launched (it would do so in June ’03), Internet Explorer had 94% of the browser market share (followed by Netscape with 2%), the top blogs of the day according to Technorati were Slashdot (listed as number 1) and Where is Raed ? (a weblog from Baghdad; it closed in 2004). And 5 years ago, there was no money in blogging.
- Tags: media, ReadWriteWeb