Just read a very thought-provoking post by Jeff Jarvis which argues that the economic woes we are facing aren’t just another economic downturn (even if a big one) but something more fundamental: the start of a large reshaping of entire industries being wrought by the 15-year-old internet.

Bill Gates famously said that we have a tendency to over-estimate the effect of technology in the short-term but under-estimate it in the longer term. And I think we saw that in spades during the first internet bubble – and will see it again as the Web 2.0 bubble busts, too.

But during that 15 years – and despite the cycles – the internet has been growing exponentially and as hardware has got more powerful, software more intelligent and the network more capable, more and more parts of our lives have moved there.

This is certainly already apparent in publishing: I was struck by the remarks by Trinity Mirror ceo Sly Bailey at last October’s AOP Conference that the economics of publishing had fundamentally changed, and that 2008 would become known as a defining moment in the evolution of digital media. This was before the scale of the layoffs being planned was clear: 1,200 jobs lost and 44 titles closed.

Jarvis says he believes the media industry will come to think itself lucky that it was early in the process because almost all industries will go through the same wrenching change as they adjust to the online revolution – but they don’t see what’s coming because they still think we’re just in a downturn.

Technorati Tags: economy, internet, downturn

I’ve been reflecting about this blog over the Christmas and New Year break. I started it, unbelievably, in September 2005 just ahead of the RBI Editor’s Conference on the 22nd. The original purpose was to illustrate a point: that self-publishing using blogging software was powerful, was here to stay, and was a significant threat or opportunity to our journalists.

It was great fun blogging the event in real time and I think it made its point.

Afterwards, though, I decided to keep the blog on and change it’s purpose a bit. That purpose is written in the sub-heading: “charting the road from paper to digital publishing”. What I have tried to do, with mixed success I suspect, (and certainly at times with erratic effort) is to highlight in short posts what I consider to be significant developments which will have some kind of impact on the journalists and editors of RBI (and other b2b publishers).

Over the past three and a bit years the technology of the web has changed a great deal and for a long while I have been using Google Reader as way of keeping up with events and I found the “share items” functionality an incredibly useful way to very rapidly create lists of linked posts which I think of as important or noteworthy. Mostly I do this as I don’t have much more to say in a blog post on the subject, though sometimes it is just to save time, as the amount of ground asking to be covered grows and grows.

Lately I’ve also been trying out Twitter and have started to use this as a way of highlighting interesting posts or web pages and I now find I’m in a bit of a dilemma. Do I start using Twitter alone? Do I use Google Reader alone? Do I use a combination? In reality I will use both for some time to come, I think, as they are both useful but in different ways, even though the result with be fragmentation of a kind.

I think now the blog has outgrown its original purpose; there are now a large number of my colleagues much more knowledgeable about the web than me and so there is little point in me trying to continue to post in the way I have in the past.

So from now on I’m going to use the blog to post longer pieces on the implications of what I see happening in the technology space and I’ll rely on Google Reader and Twitter to create bread-crumbs pointing to the sites or posts which some may find interesting or relevant.

I’m going to broaden the scope out slightly, too, to encompass changes in the social and corporate landscape which are being wrought by the changing technology (looking back, I post about this quite a bit already, so I may as well come clean!)

I’ve already rung the changes with a simpler, cleaner new look and I’ll be looking for ways to improve usability and functionality in the future.

Anyway, hope you enjoy reading the blog as it develops in 2009 and a happy New Year to one and all.

Technorati Tags: blogs, 2009

Robert Scoble has a couple of video interviews with the guys behind Panorama, an OLAP product available through Google Spreadsheets as a gadget. Part one is here and part two here. The second part shows how a free connector for Salesforce.com works. Clever stuff, and more evidence of the trouble ahead for Microsoft in 2009.

Technorati Tags: enterprise, Google, productivity

Mike Butcher, the UK arm of Techcrunch, is squatting the online identity of culture secretary Andy Burnham in protest at his suggestion that a cinema-style rating system might be introduced for the internet.

According to the FT techblog, which reports on the incident at length,

Mr Butcher will retain Mr Burnham’s Twitter account “until such time as he’s prepared to sit down and listen to some real feedback about his ideas”.
“I do intend to hand it back to him,” Mr Butcher told the FT – but only after setting up the Twitter account to follow other users “who know how the internet works, hoping he will get the kind of feedback that makes his job easier and preserves that go-getter internet culture”.

There are only seven MPs on Twitter currently, and the most prolific by a large margin, is Tom Watson, labour MP for West Bromwich East.
UPDATE: The account has been suspended – obviously someone didn’t like the joke!

Technorati Tags: protest, twitter

Is this the future of exhibition information systems? MacWorld gets its own iPhone app.

Technorati Tags: iPhone, exhibitions

Edward Roussel of the Telegraph has a long post outlining the challenges he sees facing newspapers today and some suggestions about how to tackle them, including a 10 point plan. Among the tips are: “narrow the focus”, “engage with your readers”, “embrace multimedia” and “invest in the web”. Sound advice.
Update: John A. Byrne of BusinessWeek adds his perspective on the situation facing magazines specifically.

Technorati Tags: internet, newspapers

Marketingcharts.com reports on a survey by Burst Media which it says shows just how little tolerance users have to ad-cluttered sites.

• More than half say they have a low tolerance for more than two ads per page
• 27% say they will only tolerate one ad per page
• Just over 25% say they will only tolerate two ads per page

And the more ads, the less well they work, according to the piece.

Technorati Tags: advertising, research, web

The Web 2.0 equivalent of the coffee-pot webcam – updated for our world.

Control Lights with Twitter from Justin Wickett on Vimeo.

Pointless, but strangely compelling…

Technorati Tags: internet, twitter

Ever wished there was one single page with every Web 2.0 company you could imagine listed on it – it’s here.

How many will still be here in a couple of years? Who knows?

Yahoo’s innovation hot-house in San Francisco, Brickhouse, is to close. The products it has been responsible for – Pipes and FireEagle, for instance – seem to be safe according to Twitter reports from insiders.

Technorati Tags: innovation, recession, yahoo