About the author:

Tim Burden
I'm one of the founders of NewsFIX and its current webmaster...

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geolocation (2), Google (4), HTML5 (4), IPv6 (2), predictions, social networks (2)

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Some of you coming to a blog called NewsBIZ might expect talk about the news business, and you’d be right.

So why have I spent my first two posts talking about gibberish like web standards, HTML5, Google, Apple and all that jazz?

I hinted at it near the end of my last post, where I said news companies should not bother to invest in Flash for the time being: news organizations need to get better at predicting trends and investing accordingly. Notoriously, newspapers pretty much missed the Internet revolution, allowing once-profitable classifieds businesses to disappear almost overnight and generally just not getting the whole thing.

Now, as newspaper website developer Steve Yelvington rightly points out, some news companies were on the web damn early, 1993 to be exact. But they didn’t think it through. They thought they could just make web versions of the paper and everything would be cool. They didn’t think about disintermediation. They neglected the great unbundling. The commoditization of content escaped them. The…

I’m not going to repeat it all here. It’s become tiresome.

Today, we still see newspaper companies embracing the Internet like it was something new. We applaud the forward thinking – “oh, it’s good to see that at the top levels,” we chant – but it’s not forward-thinking at all. It’s relatively progressive, and probably the right thing to do, but forward-thinking it ain’t. It’s reactive.

There are other developments where papers are late to get into the game as well. Social media. Cell phones. No kidding, I saw a post not long ago saying newspapers should jump on cell phone bandwagon and this SMS advertising thing. Folks, SMS is the new Compuserve. It’s going to be replaced, and soon, by smartphones pulling down web content over the Internet and doing IP telephony.

I’ll explain why I think that later, but for now lets categorically state that  a company should not jump late onto a bandwagon where the band is about to stop playing. Newspapers have to stop being reactive and try to be a little bit predictive. If they can predict – and by this I do not mean they need to have a crystal ball, but just watch the trend lines – then they can get in early and maybe carve out a piece for themselves, and have some control and say in the outcome. And make a profit.

One of the best ways to pick up trend lines is to watch what big, smart companies like Google are doing. What are they aiming at, and why? Let’s take a look.

IPv6

We’re running out of IP numbers, those numerical addresses that machines connected to the Internet use to talk to each other. In the current addressing system, IPv4, there are about four billion addresses. That’s not enough. We’re running out. It’s not even enough for each of the roughly seven billion people on the planet.

The new system, proposed in 1998 but still only sporadically implemented, supports 2¹²⁸ addresses. This number is astronomically large, enough for more than three billion networks for every living person.

Now, Google has some initiatives in place to get the Internet switched over to IPv6. Most of its services are available over an IPv6-enabled network, and it just announced last week that YouTube is now available in the new addressing system.

Why? Why do the Google people care?

Maybe they “care about the Internet.” They surely do, considering it made them billions. But it’s more than that. There are hints in the links above. Consider these two quotes (my emphasis):

We hope that by allowing every computer and mobile device on the network to talk to each other directly — an idea known as the “end-to-end principle” that was crucial to the original design of the Internet — IPv6 will allow the continued growth of the Internet and enable new applications yet to be invented. (Link)

It’s a win for openness and new applications because any device can connect directly to any other device on the Internet. (Link)

Google wants all devices to have their own IP addresses so it can develop new applications. And the only applications that would require each device to have its own IP address are server applications, with daemons actively listening for incoming connections from other, remote applications.

I think it’s about push. Google wants to be able to push stuff to your desktop. News items it thinks you might be interested in, and, it must be said, advertisements.

Remember the mantra popularized a couple of years ago in a study about young people?

“If the news is important, it will find me.”

Google wants to make sure of that. In conjunction with some of the other trends listed below, Google will know what you need before you do. And it will push it to you. It won’t wait for you to come looking. It’s search on steroids, and it will find you.

I don’t mean to make this sound evil. Done right, it’ll be downright useful. The point is that this is a likelihood just a few years off, and newspapers should think about how they can turn this to their advantage.

I’ll have some ideas about what news companies should do about this, along with more of the things Google is striving towards, in Part 2. Including the latest Buzz. Stay tuned.