The latest addition to my CTO blogroll is John McDowall, of Grand Central Communications. John and I shared a panel at InfoWorld's Next Generation Web Services conference. He asks a pointed question on his weblog:
All my current knowledge comes from blogs of one form or another (I include Slashdot as a blog). Why magazines now becomes the question and how to synthesize the information in blogs -- or is the distributed nature part of the fun, like delving into a used book store looking for unknown treasures. [ John McDowall]
Obviously I think magazines will continue to play a key role. If I believed that publishing is dead, I wouldn't have joined InfoWorld. With one foot in the blogosphere and the other in the magazine world, I believe that my great opportunity and challenge is to exploit the synergy of these related media.
A lot has been written and said -- maybe too much -- about blogging as journalism. I regard these as complementary agendas that should fuel one another. Many years ago at BYTE I discovered that, by using my newsgroups to engage industry practitioners in conversation, I could vastly improve the focus, depth, authenticity, and relevance of my journalistic writing. Blogging is for me just the natural continuation of that idea.
It's true that blogs have made surfing fun again. But as John points out, there is need for synthesis. I believe that I am, above all else, a synthesizer. And I believe that magazines are a great platform for doing the synthesis.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2002/10/07.html#a436