That is what Andrew Keen said in The Next Web Conference some days ago. What was also mentioned was that every old-fashioned industry is on its way out. The first victim of the new age that is coming is the music industry. Torrents, Limewire, Rapidshare are some of the reasons that music industry is about to change. iTunes & Amazon MP3 are the most important reasons though.

These e-stores were able to understand the new conditions and they adopted to the new market. They made the right choices that helped them to gain a great market share while offering amazing services to their customers. You are able to download only one song, get all the metadata you want with just one click and the most important, the MP3s you are buying from e-stores are already in the format you want them. Nobody buys nowadays an album and he is not ripping it for his iPod, it is so much easier to already have an mp3 file in the first place.

The next victim is definitely the publishers. The days that the newspaper’s brand name was more important than the journalist are long gone. One of the main characteristics of that new era is that individuals are much more important than their organization. Writers websites are being visited much more than a publishing’s company, their twitter accounts have thousands of followers. People are more important than the brand.

Big publishing companies have no future unless they are able to rewrite their business plan from scratch. Very few magazines & newspapers keep making money the old way. News are traveling very fast thanks to the Internet and, lately, thanks to twitter. Just remember the recent earthquake in Italy, the riots in Greece, the plane in the Hudson river in NY and all these cases. Until now, I have never seen a media corporation to integrate a twitter search in their site. Can you think of a better way to inform your people immediately? You don’t need money to send your reporter on site, you don’t need somebody searching twitter, you only need a twitter script. It is FREE, DIRECT content, give me a reason not to want it on your website.

What else is really important is trusting the media. Come on, let’s be honest, do you totally trust news corporation? Because I don’t. In the other hand, I almost fully trust bloggers and twitter-ers. Of course I don’t mean that I trust social media personas with one blog post or one twit, but you get my point.. As Chris Sacca said, Twitter makes us more honest, and that’s the greatest advantage of all. Individuals have already risen above their companies, we are probably in the start of the individual’s age.. Think about Obama, do you believe that majority of people out of the US know whether if Obama is in the Democratic or Republican party..?

[photo via flickr.com, user: tayseerh]

I am flying at least once per month from Athens International Airport. What I am most happy about is the moment after check-in that I am diving into a bookstore’s International Press department. The magazine that I never miss is the British Car. As its title proves, it is a magazine about cars and generally about automotive news.

Some of you, may already know that I am blogging about cars in one of the bigger blogs in Greece, pestaola.gr. That means that I have subscribed in the most known web sites, both from Greece and abroad. I also have subscribed to some less known web sites. I get too many information from all these online sources. However, when I am reading Car’s latest issue I get all those *useful* information. Car has one advantage that I have not found (yet?) in any web site: every single car presentation has the right ratio of everything that is hidden under the “shiny new car”: technical stuff, market placement, journalist’s driving experience, even some times driving tips from the guy who actually tested and improved the car just before its launch (to name one, Walter Rohrl in every Porsche). If you add the great (love it or hate it) British humor in the equation, you can get the picture..

I don’t want to be misunderstood, web sites have all the information that I need to write an article but I have to read three or four web-articles before getting all the necessary information. And that’s ok when you are about to write an article, but what happens if you are just a car-enthusiast that simply wants to get all the latest information? Even in that web-driven era, certain things have not been replaced by the web. Will they ever be?

[photo via]