The speed at which information travels is directly related to the technologies that are delivering it Believe it or not, there was a time when news traveled slowly, even in technology circles. Print magazines like Computerworld and InfoWorld sprang up in the late 1970s and early 1980s to serve a need for more in-depth coverage of the technology industry than mainstream media outlets were willing or able to provide. For a long time, that meant fat weekly magazines that landed on desks with a thud and told readers everything important that happened the week before.But rapid adoption of new technology changed the dynamics of that relationship. As InfoWorld prepares to publish its final print edition so that it can better focus its energies online, here is a snapshot of five technologies that brought us to where we are today. The PC In the old days, printing anything — let alone a magazine — was an expensive proposition that required the equivalent of a VC infusion to get your operation going and pay for printing, ink, paper, and distribution. It might not have looked like much at first, with its bulky case, floppy disk drive, and monochrome monitor. But the personal computer was destined to change all that, first by democratizing the tools for generating and storing ideas, then by becoming a platform for disseminating and consuming information. The Internet and World Wide Web Starting in the early 1990s, the Internet and World Wide Web began transforming both the expectations and habits of IT readers. The advent of tech news and niche Web sites focused on all manner of technology created an always-on, around-the-clock news cycle to which every news outlet had to respond — even specialty publications accustomed to weekly print deadlines. Pay-Per-Click Advertising Popularized by Yahoo’s Overture and by Google’s AdWords, pay-per-click advertising let companies offer specific products to people based on their interests, then provided specific intelligence back to advertisers on who had viewed the ad. Pay-per-click dampened enthusiasm for traditional print advertisements, the lifeblood of print publications, which offered no guarantees of how many readers viewed ads (“eyeballs”) and little intelligence on readership psychographics. RSS Really Simple Syndication is an XML data format that began to gain popularity shortly after the turn of the millennium. By enabling Web sites to publish information “feeds” that readers can subscribe to, RSS allowed news readers to aggregate content from across the Web based on criteria of their choosing, rather than that of an editor. Blogging Software Starting in the late 1990s, blog publishing software made keeping online journals a snap and gave birth to thousands of new blogs that generated buzz around emerging stories — often well in advance of traditional news outlets — and generated news stories on their own. In October 2005, for instance, Windows technology expert Mark Russinovich blogged about rootkit-like features in the digital rights management software that shipped with Sony music CDs. The resulting media firestorm prompted an FCC investigation and the recall of millions of affected CDs. Technology Industry