Latest Articles

Business Briefing: Where Next for Venture Capitalists?

Despite the economic downturn venture capitalists are still looking at investment opportunities in digital media. New Media Knowledge spoke to one to get the low down on what VCs want.

more

Social Media in Practice: BBC Radio 5 Live

Web publishers and broadcasters always have to look for new and innovative ways to maintain existing audiences and win new ones. When BBC Radio 5 Live realised it was losing listeners to other sources of football-based content it launched a new service to win them back. New Media Knowledge met the people responsible.

more

Conservationists Embrace Social Media

Television is increasingly embracing new media to reach new audiences and add interesting applications. New Media Knowledge talks to the people behind a new online conservation series that aims to raise wider awareness of the plight of endangered species.

more

• The Language of the Web
• Rough Guide to: In-Game Advertising
• Alexander McCall-Smith Engages Web 2.0
• Business Brief: Video Advertising Looks to Future
• ‘Virtual Home’ for Ex-Pats in London Established
• Rough Guide to: Social Media and the Law
• Record Visits for UK Blog Sites

Related Articles

• Winning the Vote on the Web

  In the US presidential election, the Web has changed how candidates operate. Tim Hoang reports on how social media has influenced the race for President. more

• Social Network Counters Malaria

  Malaria affects approximately 515 million people each year and kills between one and three million, one-third of whom are children. Having had a close up view of the mosquito-based disease during a visit to Africa, a young British entrepreneur has created a social networking site that aims to fight it. more

• Global Web Radio Set To Local Time

  An innovative project aims to make Internet Radio finally hit the right note at the right time, thanks to a new broadcasting system developed by Dutch-based international radio programmer and consultant Terry Purvis... more

• The Disabled and the Web

  Trenton Moss explains how the disabled use different ways to access the Internet as part of his NMK Interest Group about accessiblity... more

• Freelance Network

  Advertise your skills and availability as a freelancer on this site. more

Embracing The Network Effect

We're becoming accustomed to thinking of the internet as just another channel. But its most powerful and disruptive effects derive from its network aspects, explains Michael Nutley...

We're becoming accustomed to thinking of the internet as just another channel. But the internet's most powerful and disruptive effects derive from its network aspects...

By Michael Nutley of



[Register and post your own comments on this article below...]

The common shorthand for the maturing of the new media industry and the increasingly pervasive use of interactive media by businesses is that the Internet is now just another channel.

In some ways this is a bit like the adage that to a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail. If you want to talk to customers, either potential or existing, any new medium is likely to look like a channel.

But the key words here are "looks like". The Internet can act as a channel but, as a network, that’s only part of what it does, and its most powerful and disruptive effects derive from other aspects of its character. The music industry, for example, would be delighted if the Internet were just another channel for distributing its products, since it would save huge amounts in manufacturing and distribution costs, not to mention removing the retailers and their annoying habit of taking a cut of the sale price. But another network property, P2P file sharing, has left the industry raging.

Calibrating the network effect

Even in those areas where the Internet is most often supposed to be just another channel, namely marketing and advertising, network effects are becoming apparent. Viral marketing is one example, since it can only function in a highly connected world. There has, of course, always been word of mouth, but viral marketing enables you to have your customers pass on the marketing material you’ve created.

Blogging is an even better example or, at least, some aspects of it are. There are probably as many types of blogging, and reasons for blogging, as there are bloggers but they all rely on one thing – referred traffic. What makes blogging work is that bloggers comment on and link to other blogs. The Internet is providing a channel between them and their readers, but it’s the network that enables those readers to find them.

In this sense the Internet boom, which ended so catastrophically five years ago, begins to look like an anomaly. Much of the activity of that period was based on the Internet acting as a cheaper way of carrying out conventional business, and many of the ideas about genuinely new ways of doing business were obscured.

Emergent power of the internet

Speaking at a regional networking event last summer, I was asked why I thought some businesses from the boom years had survived while others had not. The best answer I could come up with was that the survivors had used the Internet to do things that couldn’t be done any other way. Ebay, for example, is often described as the world’s largest car boot sale. That scale is only achievable online, as is the seller rating system, which allows worldwide commerce to flourish. Search advertising, which now commands more of UK marketers’ budgets than cinema advertising, can only work online.

There’s no doubt that the Internet has caused some profound changes in its relatively short life. What’s really exciting is that those changes are only the start of the process. The future is networked.

[Register and post your own comments on this article below...]


Michael Nutley is the editor of New Media Age

New Media Age and MusicTank are supporting our one-day conference In The City '05 with NMK @ the ICA, London, 7 June 2005