Welcome to the Escape Blog

So, that’s it. As predicted last week, IT Week is to cease publication and merge with Computing with the Computing website handling breaking news and the ‘new look’ magazine containing a news round-up alongside more in-depth comment and analysis.

This comes as no surprise seeing the congestion of having two very similar weekly publications in the Incisive Media stable. IT Week was a good magazine with some good writers and the (much needed) redesign suggested that it was still evolving and moving forwards.

And yet, money makes the world go round and the media is dependent on those advertising pounds. Tim Weller, group chief executive of Incisive Media:

Our advertisers want the demand-generation benefits of online, yet the reassurance of print. Delivering the right content in the right medium increases its chances of being read, offering advertisers greater opportunities to interact with audiences.

This brings about an interesting question about the sustainability of print publications, especially in the trade press. This is not a new debate with, for example, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer recently suggesting that in 10 years there “will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form.”

Interesting too that this comes within a month of IT Pro’s editor, Chris Green, disclosing that every few months he runs a contributor/traffic analysis to measure the site’s “page impressions (PIs) and unique user visits (UUs) generated by author, rather than by article type or section.”

Chris adds: “The end result is that we have the traffic generated by an author alongside how much we’ve spent with them over the given period.”

Traffic, popularity and page impressions is where it’s at!

Time will tell just how this one plays out and too much forward-looking analysis is perhaps dangerous (even headline-grabbing statements from Microsoft CEOs). It will be interesting to see how Computing evolves and manages the print v. online conundrum and also how PR evolves as a result.

This debate still has legs. I wonder who will be next…

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Catchy title for my first post on the new Wildfire blog!

This week we discovered that Jason Calacanis, (he of Mahalo fame) through a typically over-the-top declaration, has decided to stop blogging and instead move his thoughts/rants/opinions to a subscriber-only email mailing list. As the man himself states:

Starting today all of my thoughts will be reserved for a new medium. Something smaller, something more intimate, and something very personal.

Predictably, this has garnered a fair degree of interest, skepticism and bewilderment from the blogosphere and of course there has been the predictable allegation of ‘PR stunt‘ banded around for good measure.

Calacanis lives on – all his email messages can be read online and you can even subscribe to his email mailing list. In his first email, he crystallises his thinking:

…while blogging is clearly booming, there has been a deep qualitative change in the nature of the ’sphere. There are so many folks involved in blogging to today, and it’s moving at a much quicker pace thanks to “social accelerants” like TechMeme, digg, Friendfeed and Twitter. Folks are so desperate to be heard–and we all want to be heard that’s why we blog–that the effort put into being heard has eclipsed the actual hearing. Bloggers spend more time digging, tweeting, and SEOing their posts than they do on the posts themselves.

So is blogging dead? Has increased interest from ‘the masses’ turned blogging into yet another commercial marketing tool? There is perhaps an element of truth here and it is certainly dangerous when the promotion becomes more important than the content (this doesn’t only apply to blogs!).

BUT, there is no doubt that blogging still has a very important role to play. It can still add value. And that is the key point here.

Of course there is more out there than ever before, and the quality certainly varies from place to place. But I still learn more from the blog posts I read everyday than I do in a month of reading newspapers, watching TV or even surfing the web.

RSS allows you to pick, choose and customise content that works for you, using the wisdom of those you choose to ‘follow’ to direct and educate. In addition, blogging gives you a unique opportunity to start and participate in meaningful, ongoing conversations. Social media has made this easier than ever and micro-blogging continues to further the trend.

I’ve subscribed to Calacanis’ email list (mainly out of inquisitiveness). Will I keep reading it? Probably. As long as the content stays interesting and ‘valuable’, but it still doesn’t feel quite right.

My email inbox is dominated by the daily business processes that need to be dealt with, (alongside the obligatory newsletters and marketing collateral) that I wonder if I will have the time or inclination in that environment to stop and read a long blog-like scribe.

Time will tell, but I certainly won’t be turning my back on blogs and blogging just yet.

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