How does the world look to you?

In the old world, known to tech entrepreneurs as the terrestrial world, we had radio stations, newspapers, TV and magazines. Each had its own strengths and weaknesses and its own operating practices.

Magazines and newspapers had letters to the editor. All you needed was a pen, paper and stamp or an e-mail account. You could contribute your thoughts, and the editor would choose which contributions to share with readers.

Radio stations had talk format -- a format that I had the good fortune of hosting for many years. Talk radio was interactive and engaging (with the right host). But every host had his own quirks and biases. Some, such as Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly, became so well known for their biases that they often became the subject of the discussion. With talk radio, you might not get on the air if your subject was not aligned with the host's viewpoint.

Newspapers and TV traditionally had extensive news gathering organizations. That expense made it difficult for some traditional media to survive in the Web 2.0 environment where the audience contributes the content that is published by the Web operator. Yet it allowed these organizations to do fact checking to ensure that what was being said was actually true -- and to dig into topics that might not ordinarily get attention.

That's a huge contrast to the newer world of Web 2.0. Wikipedia, for instance, has a lot of contributors, and its articles are mostly correct; but you often don't always know the validity of the source and can't be sure of the accuracy. Now bigger than any other encyclopedia, Wikipedia, even brags that it's "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit."

Web 2.0 will undoubtedly continue to grow, especially as entrepreneurs create new Web 2.0 offerings. Despite the business problems plaguing traditional media, many traditional media are still with us -- and are likely to be for a long time. Though some will disappear, others will adapt and thrive.

So stop talking about them as a relic of the past!

Perhaps I should have heeded my own advice last week, when discussing Microsoft's Bing.com. In that column, I said Ask.com used to provide previews of Web pages found in searches there. I had just done a search using Bing; then, after examining its feature that previews Web pages, I remembered how Ask.com used to do it. So I did a search on Ask.com to see if it has changed much ... and didn't see the previews. So I assumed they no longer exist.

An astute reader promptly shot off an e-mail to my editors letting us know that Ask.com still provides those previews by scrolling over an image of binoculars that appears with most, but not all, search results at the Web site.

I blew my fact checking, even though I tried -- like traditional media do. Perhaps my search yielded no results having the binoculars, but more likely, I just didn't notice them because I haven't searched at Ask.com in a long time.

The astute reader's comments made me think about how easy it is to dismiss a concept -- perhaps even a whole industry -- based on incomplete information or inaccurate data. Unfortunately that is often the sort of date that is heavily distributed via Web 2.0 contributions, rankings and references.

Done poorly, Web 2.0 will make us, as an audience and global community, less information rich -- not better informed. Done properly, it will give us new access to better information, quicker. Let's just hope Web 2.0 retains enough of the values of traditional media to get it right.