Quatro grandes desenvolvimentos da digitalização (online world)

«Broadly, there have been four big developments in the online world in the past few years.

The first is the decline in the cost of media distribution—thanks to digitization and broadband—which has helped to make even relatively unloved content commercially viable. The second phenomenon, which has been sparked by the decline in the cost of media production, as well as by the development of tools for sharing content, has been the rise of user-generated content perhaps better described as "participatory media". This has been exemplified by the phenomenal success of web sites like MySpace, acquired by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, and YouTube, the video-sharing site acquired by Google. The third development is the rise of sharing, be that deliberately, for example, through wikis—a software tool allowing for collaborative working—or involuntarily. The way in which information is organized is also changing – phenomenon number four. Instead of a traditional hierarchy of information by experts, i.e., a taxonomy, web users are increasingly categorizing online content—web pages, photographs and links—for themselves. This dramatically reduces the cost of search and information management and has given rise to new businesses.»

«The Impact of Digitalization», KPMG, 2007