• by Tom Hespos , July 16, 2002

In the early days of the World Wide Web, people in the communications business made a huge deal about "leveling the playing field" within the publishing industry. The idea was simple – the web was a medium through which independent publishers and large, established publishers alike could provide content without having to make huge investments in distribution, printing, broadcasting equipment or any of the usual investments that might be required in order to convey and carry a message. At the time, no one had seen a mass medium as cheap as the web.

In 1995, I was working at Young & Rubicam and dreaming of an America in which smaller, independent publishers enjoyed the fruits of their labor much like a Times Mirror or a CBS. The web was going to be the medium that breathed new life into Oliver Wendell Holmes' marketplace of ideas, diversified America's information and entertainment options and made it easier for publishing newbies to compete.

Millions of GeoCities and Tripod pages notwithstanding, the web only partially delivered on that promise. In the first couple years after the release of Mosaic, publishing content via a website required significant technical knowledge. First, one had to learn HTML. Granted, computer programmers tended to look at average folks learning HTML the way that parents look at their toddlers when they first pick up their Tinkertoys or Lincoln Logs. HTML is simple as far as computer programming is concerned. But imagined barriers are often as challenging as real ones, and many people who would have loved to have their own website never got serious enough to check out a copy of "Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML in 14 Days." For every Matt Drudge or Philip Kaplan, there are probably thousands of people who think the technical hurdles between them and their publishing dreams are insurmountable.

Even with a WYSIWYG HTML editor like Dreamweaver or FrontPage, updating websites is a giant pain in the butt. I've launched several content sites over the years, and many of them have withered away and died because the simplest updates required significant work. To truly realize a level playing field, a website update should take no more than a few minutes. For many web publishers, quick updates meant investing in a database-driven content management system, which could be expensive and complicated to integrate.

But now we're starting to see serious innovation in content publishing – things that bring the online publishing experience to people who, for whatever reason, don't have the wherewithal to learn the technology end of the business. Blogger and LiveJournal have made it possible for anyone to publish to the web at a moment's notice with minimal integration work. When constructing my company's website, I elected to integrate Blogger into UnderscoreMarketing.com's news section, so that anyone on our management team could post updates at any time. Tons of other websites have taken advantage of similar systems. Rick Bruner's Executive Summary site (a terrific read, BTW) takes full advantage of the Blogger system. In doing so, Rick has probably saved himself countless hours of coding and FTPing.

Easy-to-use content management systems are a great first step toward truly leveling the playing field. But we still need further innovation in this area. It would be nice to see a company come along and make animation and graphics as simple as Blogger and LiveJournal have made content management. I think we're on our way – the first time I plugged my digital camera into my XP notebook, the operating system automatically detected my Sony Cybershot and launched a wizard for downloading the pictures and movies stored in the camera. How long will it be before we see something that makes manipulating graphics and images so simple and intuitive that even the "technology-impaired" can easily construct photo essays and online newspaper-type layouts?

I'm betting that a lot of this technology is not very far off. And once it makes a splash, we could be looking at an explosion of new content sites. What could this do to online media planning five or ten years down the road? It might be wise to think about what the marketplace might look like if a wave of independent publishers suddenly started entering the game en masse.

As is the case with so many promises the Internet made in its early years, the delivery of that promise is taking a bit longer than we initially thought. I say the era of the independent web publisher is still ahead of us and not behind us. And if I'm right, online media planning will see some interesting twists in the next few years.