A tipping point
The notion of on-demand news has always been at the base of the blogosphere.
But before the blogosphere there was Interactive TV - and the base of that (besides the hype of on-demand movies) was on-demand news. TV news.
But it didn’t surprise me that in the late 90’s anyone brave enough to go and try and offer on-demand News - was gonna charge for it. We were working (at the time) on some new tools that combined TV broadcasting and web portals - so I was tracking this sort of stuff.
So the word is out that CNN has decided to abandon their ‘walled garden’ and (heaven forbid) make their news on-demand service free. I wonder how much stuff it really is?
I wonder if they’ll go and just put EVERYTHING up? I wonder if Fox and MSNBC will follow? Still more - I WONDER WHAT FORMAT THEIR META-DATA will take?
Don’t you?
Don’t you wish they’d have tagging, RSS, a giant taxonomy of all things, the most amazing set of APIs and namespaces - that brings to us what NewsML promised?
God wouldn’t life be great - then. Maybe they’re watching the BBC and saying “hhhmmmmmmmm”.
But at least we’ll get SOME of that news - huh? Now I just wonder if there’s any meta-data in it - at all - or is it just another version of podcasting - but this time from a major media entity.
Afterall - who would have thought that a major grass roots media revolution would be launched on a standard that didn’t even say “what’s inside it, who’s in it and when and where was it made?”
Oh - well maybe next time. Or maybe CNN will get it right. Afterall - they are professionals.