Amy Webb ran through ten technologies at the Online News Association conference in 2008, each with a suggested newsroom use. The list is a good record of what looked imminent that year.
Two-dimensional QR barcodes, already used in print advertising, could point a phone camera at online resources. WiMax mobile broadband promised connectivity everywhere, so editors could assign stories in real time and reporters could send multimedia back immediately. Geobrowsing meant information attached to a location — news chosen by where the reader is, and a way for editors to see where reporters are. Cloud computing was approaching its tipping point, which came with the flat advice to stop building desktop content management systems. The web as operating system followed from it.
Visual search was the part that startled the room: a face filter appended to a Google image search, and TinEye, which reported an image’s history including changes made in Photoshop. Midomi did the same job for sound, which Webb suggested a reporter could use to identify a song. Lifestreaming, via FriendFeed, Twitter and Delicious, carried her main argument — content should not be tied to a platform, because Twitter might be hot then and gone in eighteen months. Video on demand was moving off the web and into the living room, the car and the Xbox. The semantic web, with Twine then in private beta, would hit journalists hard. Multi-screen journalism closed the list: one breaking story followed across a computer, a phone and a television.