We continue to get a daily newspaper, the Chronicle, despite the fact that nearly every day, we complain about how bad it is. It is so thin, editorially biased, and has very little content. I read the comics and local columnists, and Barb scans the news section. We do this in order to have something to read as we have our breakfast. This habit of morning reading is impossible to break, and in fact, we have no desire to do so.

After breakfast, we both read news and blogs and such online, at our computers, getting what we consider the "real" news. I read today (online, of course!) about Fujitsu's new e-paper, a bendable page that receives information wirelessly and needs very little or no electricity to hold an image. This will be marketed in 2006 or 2007, so perhaps I can look forward to the day when I hold my individualized sheet of e-paper, that pulls my RSS feed, bringing me the content I want, at the table, with my bagel and coffee.

Speaking of news delivery, I happened across a blog entry yesterday that talked about the technological changes in news delivery systems since 9/11. Remember how, in 2001, we talked about how last minute cell phone calls from the doomed airplanes changed our perception of the event? And how the home videos of the WTC brought everything so close up and real? Think about what the internet has turned into:

When 911 happened, most people hadn't heard of bloggers or Wikipedia, there was no Feedster or Technorati, Google News did not exist, there was no Flickr and people did not have camera phones.

These products and services are not a result of 911, but this was the event that created one facet of what is now an unshakable trend, real-time, ubiquitous, truly democratic media.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 13, 2005 at 10:38 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.