The industry once thought that blogging would somehow replace journalism. It turns out the threat to journalism is something bigger. It is apparent through the posting and feedback activity from this contest this past week that there are unique values to blogging. The unique value is virtual interaction. The interaction from readers through comments has generated further discussions. Blogging is therefore a modernized version of group message forums, but without moderator intervention or fixed subjects.
Visit http://blogto.com/ to see what I mean.
Does blogging have value internally, in an organization? I am not aware of how it would be, unless someone could shed some experiences on how a blogging culture could be successfully implemented in an organization. In the IT department, time is probably best spent resolving bugs, issues, and having face-to-face meetings to generate both leadership and interaction among staff.
The real threat to journalism is:
Not blogging, it’s Google. I was reading a recent article in Business Week about Google. It is a massive company with valuations far greater than some major newspaper companies in the U.S. Simply load http://www.google.com/news. Just how much did the company have to pay for this content? High profitability is realized when revenue through advertising exceeds the cost of providing content. When the cost of content is zero, someone has to pay: the journalists who are paid by their companies. If you add Youtube to this argument, it’s apparent that the threat of this profitable business model will extend to original video content providers.
New Toys:
Are you an early adapter? If you bought lined up to get the iPhone last year, would you have been annoyed that Apple dropped its prices by $100 shortly thereafter? Would you be even more shocked at the pace of technology toy depreciation with the announcement of the iPhone v2.0? This past week, the pricing for the iPhone was announced: $199 for an 8GB model and $299 for 16GB. How fast can you say “Ebay iPhone v1.0 and iTouch?” Too bad Canadians have only one mobile provider to rely on. Care to make a prediction on what the monthly rate will be? Will there be an unlimited plan? Stay tuned. In the U.S. plans include unlimited data usage. With Rogers we can only hope to get something as good, even though they have no one to compete with (is Blackberry a competitor?)
What’s on your New Toys, New Software Shopping List for June?
I am going to stick with web surfing on the desktop PC. I’m excited from this back week about the new version of the Opera Browser http://www.opera.com/.
2) Firefox 3.0
3) The Apple iPhone
4) Asus EEE 900
5) MSI Wind
The above list reads more like a personal shopping list than a corporate one. After all, toys and corporate priorities mix like oil and water. A hypothetical IT priorities project list might be:
1) Desktop virtualization
Challenge: increasing disk access speed times to make virtualization less sluggish
2) Windows Refresh
Challenge: Skipping Vista and waiting for Vista
3) Integrated database management and business intelligence:
Challenge: reducing a corporation’s reliance on Microsoft Access and Excel spreadsheets for corporate data management
4) Data Security
Challenge: USB memory sticks!
5) Web 2.0
Challenge: see getting past item #3 first 🙂
Does your organization have any of those items on its priorities list? If so, feel free to comment.