Handling the New Media

Hello,

The purpose of the blog is to understand how many of us are exposed to the new vehicles of communications? Just a few years back , when Internet was a still in its early years and the Bulletin Boad services or BBS were the true forums for geeks to share ideas / post message and software.

Those simple BBS haev evolved over the last years and churned out many avatars - from IRC & ICQ as chat services to IMs and now community building sites such as Orkut. The options for an individual to express his opinion has also evolved. By putting a tripod site was very chique a few years but now publishing a blog is so convinient and yet so simple.

Podcasts , photosharing sites such as flickr and community builders such asbarcamp are few more examples of how we can effectivley communicate and share our ideas and learn.

But the irony of the all this developments is very few common people are aware of these new options they have. I dont know how many of these vehicles are being used by our stundent to learn or our elder to communicate. The real challenege of these new media is to translate into an effective social usage model. Only then these new media will be successful.

The need of the hour is to educate / train and localize these new medias for usage beyond geeks.

I tried setting up a blog for my father in law who is an expert in Architecture and has immense knowledge on his subject matter. But to get him use this vehicle is challenging for the simple fact that he is not conditioned to use the Internet medium as compared to a good old pen and paper model.

Let us find more usage models with the new Technologies and applications which are evoloving and let us share them with our famlies.