With the Web and its successors … information professionals will create independent information products – user interfaces to information created not with software but with the tools they are already familiar – words, pictures and other familiar carriers of meaning.
In the future, every Internet operator will be subject to local laws … And software will be developed to provide the appropriate local censorship.
Customers will have much better access to evaluative information about the product, so customers will get much better educated, which will be perhaps the single largest impact of the Internet on our economy as we become smarter about spending our money.
Viewers [could] choose material a la carte from a computer screen, just as if they were ordering from a restaurant menu … offering a focused selection of information relevant to Vietnamese immigrants living anywhere in the United States, for example, or world and national news of special interest to people in Peoria, Ill.
There’s a tremendous market for those in the publishing business to turn their experience in making sense of complex bodies of information to this new world of online information publishing. To me, one of the most exciting things about the Web, long-term, is that it is the first environment that allows non-programmers to create user interfaces.
Digital video news that can be customized might be a more compelling offering. This is going to reinvent the news industry.
Almost everything will have an Internet Protocol address – vending machines, your refrigerators, maybe toasters.
When thinking about online books, publishers focus too narrowly on the content. Early online products have focused on searchability and multimedia as key advantages over print products. But the Web shows a third key advantage of an online product – the creation of information interfaces.
A nationwide digital video service … would let users of personal computers customize their own video newscasts or conduct online research from video news archives.
I think that the potential of the Web not for advertising but for information fulfillment has yet to be tapped.