Blogs vs. Newspapers

By raheem

I believe the blogs of today are becoming the newspapers of tomorrow. As a news addict I visit major news sites like nytimes.com and washingtonpost.com on a daily basis, atleast 5 times a day. I also read blogs and visit the blogs a few more times than newspapers each day.

Each time I visit one of the major blogs like techcrunch.com and gigaom.com, for the most part I get treated to new content. I dont have to waste time searching for the latest item, since its right there on top. But when I go to nytimes.com, the headline and image stays the same for most of the day. Unless I am searching for something specific or dig 2-3 links deeper I might not find anything of interest. I end up spending more time at a blog than a newspaper sites. So the blogs are winning as far as pulling in visitors and keeping them longer.

Now let’s take the cost factor. Some of the successful blogs post about 20 articles a day using a max of 10 writers. The average newspaper site publishes almost 100s of articles each day using 100s of writers. So from a cost perspective, the blogs are winning too. Add to this blogs dont have the publishing costs of a paper edition.

From the perspective of consumer trends, if you do a little analysis, its easy to see that attention spans are shorter, people are more busy, people like to do fun little things in short bursts of downtime (riding the train, drinking coffee in the morning, eating lunch at the desk, etc). Blogs fit in nicely with these lifestyle trends. Blog posts are usually short, which makes it easy to consume them. Since they put their latest posts on the top, you can easily read the latest items. From a life style and trends perspective, the blogs are winning as well.

The only area blogs are not winning is in the in-depth feature reporting arena. Newspapers and magazines still produce the great in-depth articles that win pulitzer prices and are often deeply satisfying reading materials.

But here is the thing – setting up a blog is quite easy – so its easy to fathom that current newspapers should easily be able to morph into blog. If not, they could easily end up buying the major blog sites of today.

PS. Dave Winer is helping nytimes.com become more like blogs by getting them to start using a blog like structure. Check out what he has done so far.

PPS. Dave Winer – the father of blogging does not have links to individual posts. I guess just because you are the father of something, does not mean you will always make the right decision

Information R/evolution

By raheem

Here is a great video showing the evolution of the web in the context of the information organization. The video is from Kent State Professor Michael Wesch, who came out with another great video earlier this year about Web 2.0.

Sign up to new service without giving your email address

By pandu

Just found out about a great way to sign up to new web services using a fake email address. The fake email address is available from mailinator.com. While you could sign up for a fake account with Yahoo or Gmail. Mailinator is really creative because here you dont have to sign up to create the fake mailbox. Once you create the fake mailbox, anyone can access it – there is no login required to create or access the fake mailbox. Just go to the site, enter the name of the mailbox and mailinator displays anything sent to that mailbox.

Now when you sign up to a any new online service, you can enter the fake email address from mailinator.com. Mailinator will collect any kind of verification email sent which can be used to complete registration. So now you have signed up to the service without sharing any of your personal info. Great way to protect online privacy.

Microsoft on-demand movement too slow

By pandu

There have been multiple press releases from Microsoft in recent weeks touting their ondemand releases. Today’s New York Times has a report about Microsoft’s plans to offer a web storage service that will enable users to upload and store up to 1000 documents. However, you can only edit those documents if you already own an offline version of Word or Excel. They are obviously taking such steps to ensure the survival of their Office cash cow.

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