Today’s NYTimes Business Section is full of stories, seemingly unrelated in some cases, about how the net is opening up new opportunities for involvement in news, entertainment and other areas of communication. Among the articles is the center cover about citizen journalism featuring the Greensboro News and Record (with great image of their front page), an article on podcasting (there have been several over the past few days), an article about legal movie downloads, an article on AOL and Live 8 and the remaking of AOL to be less of a gated community, an opinion piece that says that whatever the Supreme Court decided about file sharing it will not change behaviors — this is supported by quotes from Hilary Rosen, and that’s just what I remember just now.
The common link between the articles is not just the net, but the social use of the net and the demands placed on our commercial structures by the people using the net. Will they get on the cluetrain or has it already left their station?