The Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 57% of American teenagers create content for the Internet-from text to pictures, music and video. says Paul Saffo, a director at the Institute for the Future in California says “In this new-media culture people no longer passively “consume” media (and thus advertising, its main revenue source) but actively participate in them, which usually means creating content, in whatever form and on whatever scale.

This does not have to mean that “people write their own newspaper”, says Jeremy Zawodny, a prominent blogger and software engineer at Yahoo!, an Internet portal. “It could be as simple as rating the restaurants they went to or the movie they saw,” or as sophisticated as shooting a home video. (Delaney, Hastings, Rainie, & Orville, 2006).

In terms of higher education recruitment, blogging is the new media. It is participatory and it is a new tool that marketers will need to integrate into the marketing mix. With nearly 60% of teenagers creating content and participating in that media, it is easy for a university or a business to create relevant content and function as an active participant in the lives of potential students. The first step in recruitment is relationship building and relevance.

Delaney, Hastings, Rainie, & Orville, conducted an interview with Terry Semel of Yahoo!. He spoke in depth about portals and blogs serving as the new media and communication tool of choice for college age people. For his first few decades in the media industry-at CBS, then Walt Disney, then Warner Brothers, where he was chairman and co-chief executive-Terry Semel felt pretty clear about what media companies were. Then, in 2001, he left Hollywood and went to Silicon Valley as the new boss of Yahoo!, the world’s largest Internet portal. A self-avowed technophobe who barely knew how to use e-mail, Mr. Semel suddenly found himself in “meetings with a bunch of 23-year-olds”. He already had the ambition to turn Yahoo! into the archetypal “21st-century media company”, but suddenly he was no longer so clear about what that meant.

Mr. Semel has spent the past five years educating himself, including the counsel of trusted advisers such as his daughters, aged 24, 19 and 13. “The first does a lot on the internet, the second does everything on the internet, and the third “lives online” and has so many beeping devices that Semel, who has a New York accent and the kind of humor that goes with it, occasionally wonders “whether she is trafficking”. Between them, they have helped him to work a few things out.

The Internet “is a much larger change than the coming of television” in the 20th century, says Semel. In the past, “someone decided that the news goes on at 11 o’clock at night; people like my wife never even saw the news, because she never stayed up that late. We all grew up when somebody else was the programmer; now the user is the programmer.” That is change number one. To Semel, it means that Yahoo! must do more than provide technology. “We decided to open Yahoo! up, so that anybody using their personalized start page MyYahoo!  and can instantly go wherever they want to go,” even if that leads to the web pages of rivals. That credibility, he thinks, will keep users coming back for a “deeper engagement”. As people spend more time on Yahoo!’s pages-news, blogs, e-mail, chat groups, photo and music sites and so on-whether as their final destination or as stops on a journey, Yahoo! can put more and better advertising in front of them.

Change number two, says Semel, is that-unlike in television, say-”you don’t need hits”. Many small audiences are as good for advertisers as few large audiences, and indeed may be better. This has huge implications for content, turning it into one long continuum-from professional to amateur, from blockbuster to subculture niche.

Chris Anderson of Wired magazine calls this stretched statistical distribution “the long tail”. Anderson argues that old-media economics, which are biased toward the hits at the “head” of this distribution, are being replaced by new-media economics, which allow creation and consumption along the entirety of a much longer content tail.

Exchanges become necessary because people need help navigating around this huge continuum of content. In the present century, says Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future (2006), “you get large by allowing the many and small to gather on your lawn. This is the media equivalent of what eBay, a Silicon Valley neighbor to Google and Yahoo!, has done for the trading of secondhand goods among individuals. It is what Wikipedia has achieved as an encyclopedia. It is also very similar to what, say, the New York Stock Exchange does.”

A university or institution needs to become the great lawn to accommodate the giant Frisbee of ideas and conversations to be thrown about by current and potential students.