Old School – Gold Rush In Cyberspace

In 1995, while I was working in a bar and playing rounds of twilight, I came across this article which pretty much changed my life and got me into the business.

Gold Rush in Cyberspace, a cover story written by Vic Sussman and Kenan Pollack in 1995 for US News and World Report, is one of the first big-media stories I read about the internet and how it would change everything. It is one of a few sources that convinced me to get into the game.

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/biztech/articles/951113/archive_033371_print.htm

Some gems:

To many, this is the dawn of a radical new commercial era in which a single medium combines elements that used to be conveyed separately: text, voice, video, graphics. Countless firms will be transformed in the process, including publishing, banking, retailing and deliverers of health care, insurance and legal services. Predicts the newsletter ComputerLetter: “The Web will become the transparent fluid in which all of our personal, corporate and public data are miraculously suspended.”

Understand the medium. Conducting business on the Web, a phenomenon with no parallel in communications history, will demand new strategies in advertising and marketing. Unlike broadcasting and print, which are one-to-many entities with a passive audience, the Internet is a many-to-many medium in which everyone with a computer and modem is a potential publisher. Web surfers, for example, tend to be self-directed. They typically have little patience for “brochureware,” advertisements that are thrown up like so many billboards.