The Future of Media?

A fascinating faux-documentary on the "history" of media. It's interesting up until the present, and once it gets into the "future" of media it gets a little freaky. Some very compelling stuff in here. Food for thought at any rate. A point to Mean Rachel for posting it; she is a blogette on the cutting edge of the nouveau-internets.

This especially interests me because in my industry (marketing) we are currently talking a lot about this Web 2.0 stuff, the up-and-coming Social Media Optimization (just like Search Engine Optimization has been and still is what everyone wants), and the shift from traditional media to newer forms in general. For example, in our last new business meeting, we were actually discussing "the blogosphere." This is pretty incredible when I think back to even a few years ago, when I first started blogging - when we used to joke about getting paid to blog.

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On a related note, there's an article here which breaks down an experiment contrasting the standard pay-per-click online advertising structure (Google AdWords) with paying someone ($10/hr.) to optimize the social media network for the four sites in the experiment; basically paying someone to blog, follow links, engage in discussions, comment on other blogs, etc. - in essence creating along business lines that which so many of us have already established for mere social/entertainment purposes with our Weblogs, Facebook and MySpace pages, and any number of social networking or personal "online presence" vehicles.

The experiment is of great interest to anyone in marketing (or indeed, anyone who owns a business or wishes to generate increased Web traffic), but I think it's of more general interest considering this exploding "prosumer" network that we now have on the internets. Pretty interesting stuff, and makes one's head spin a bit.

P.S. Can you link me on your blog? Thanks!