My “Digital Output” column for Editor & Publisher, published January 14, 2002, in the E&P Technical section. It’s a start-of-the-year prediction column, written as the newspaper industry came out of the budget-and-staff cutting of 2001, and it lays out six technology areas worth watching.
The framing came from Fleetwood Mac — the subhead read “Let Fleetwood Mac be your guide in 2002: Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow …” — and the column’s central point was that the recession was no excuse to stop paying attention to what was coming next.
My major “Digital Output” resolution for 2002 is deceptively simple: Don’t stop thinking about the future.
The six areas: peer-to-peer technology, which I argued was alive well past Napster and would matter both inside companies and as a link to suppliers; consumer-centric systems, urging publishers to look beyond single-purpose circulation, classified, and e-commerce systems toward one integrated, enterprise-wide approach to customer data; XML publishing; remote digital publishing; wireless inside the company; and wireless for the consumer.
On XML, the column drew the distinction plainly:
HTML (hypertext markup language) is about displaying information. XML is about defining information.
The remote digital publishing section looked at two approaches — the Adobe Acrobat and/or NewsStand Inc. model of compressing a complete newspaper for transmission to a customer’s computer, which The New York Times was experimenting with, and transmitting pages to remote printing equipment. PressPoint Inc. had already gone out of business trying to make the second work; other players named were NewspaperDirect, the Xerox Newspaper Network, and Oc
u00e9 N.V. My conclusion about all of it:
The challenge in all of these systems might be more human than technological.
For wireless, 802.11b and 802.11a and Bluetooth were on the “2002 watch list,” and on the consumer side the column pointed to the Palm OS becoming “more multimedia-centric.” The column ran with the standard tagline identifying me as managing director of Finberg-Gentry, the Digital Futurist Consultancy.