Genres for a new mass medium: the Internet

The Internet is about to become the fourth mass medium - besides Press, Radio, and TV. Personalized news and Video-on-Demand are just initial content types: like the other media, the Internet will bring forth specific genres. In the first part of this article, important characteristics of these future genres are worked out; keywords for these characteristics are: interactive, personalized, and evolutionary. It is shown what content creation for the new medium involves software engineering to a large extend. As a consequence, part two of the article relates the above characteristics to major requirements for authoring/development tools and methods. Requirements are discussed in further detail; they relate to computer science aspects such as realtime support, unification of HCI and softwrae, tight integration of enhanced browsing support, contents with variable challange, and other