Different technologies that affected the Publishing business

There was a time when magazines used to come out weekly and news traveled at a snails pace. But in the recent decade, technology started playing an all important role and changed much of the publishing industry. In the race against time or competition, the publishing industry has gone through a complete change and there are five major technologies that have taken publishing to its highest level or where it stands today.

The first one responsible is the PC. There was a time when it was almost next to impossible to get a print out especially since it was an expensive proposition and you had to pay for the four ingredients of success – ink, paper, printing and distribution. The PC changed a lot of things because it became the source of storing information and enhancing the operation of publishing tools.

The second most important part of this revolution is the World Wide Web also known as the Internet. It transformed the reading habits as now a reader could read an informative article as well as write a blog. So information started to flow both ways as you could read someone else’s views as well as share your own. This led to publications working on a tight deadline.

The third important technological change is the pay per click advertising that came into the forefront thanks to yahoo and Google. This helped companies immensely as they were able to focus on offering products driven purely by a consumer interest. The flip side of this technology was that print publications could no longer offer guarantee of eyeballs (readership).

The fourth technological change is through RSS, which stands for really simple syndication. It is basically an XML data format that gained popularity around the beginning of the new millennium. Existence of an RSS led to the extinction of the editor. The last but not the least is the blogging software, which started in the late 1990’s and made the Internet a repository of personal blogs, news blogs, travel blogs etc.