Content development for the Internet as a mass medium

Abstract

The Internet is about to become the fourth mass medium, besides press, radio, and TV. Personalized news and video-on-demand are just the initial content types: like the other media, the Internet will bring forth more specific new content types. This article identifies important characteristics of these future content types. It shows that content creation for the new medium involves software engineering to a large extent; requirements for its support are derived. The claimed characteristics and requirements are backed with experiences from experimental development of new contents, software engineering aids, and exploration tools for the new mass medium.