FOLIO: Personalities -- The Blog People Page

On the face of it, Internet technology should be a b-to-b publisher's best friend. Sure, the Internet effectively put an end to the long and lazy golden age of publishing (1493-1993, RIP) when we used "ink" and a composite of mulched tree to disseminate information.

But that same Internet is making our lives as publishers easy in so many other ways, right?

Take recent efforts by Google and Apple to resell e-subscriptions to publications (in case you missed it, Google is rumored to be launching a digital newsstand, an attempt to one-up Apple's iTunes subscription service). These offerings will supposedly provide publishers with an exciting and ubiquitous new sales channel for their products.

Except... they won't More...

Internet publishing today may seem complicated but in fact our industry is governed by a simple paradox: the easier you make it for people to publish information, the lower the quality of the information they produce, and the smellier the audience that reads it.

This trend reaches its nadir-or, apex, depending on how much pre-IPO stock you own-in social networks like Twitter and Facebook, where the door is always open (welcome, Internet loonies!) and there are no restrictions on what you can post, regardless of how annoying or how vacuous, with the corollary that most of the content found therein is as valuable as an old tea bag, with audience demographics to match. (It's not a coincidence that LinkedIn, which at least nods in the dir More...

As the world begins its long slow spin from one decade to the next, the spin (or marketing) industry also is undergoing a marked transformation-from "impact" to "information." In the 20th century the focus of marketing was on advertising-specifically on making a short, sharp impression. Advertisers' print creative had to pass the three second test-imparting as much positive information as possible before a potential customer quite literally turned the page.

The Internet, of course, is different. And when the World Wide Web happened, everything in marketing *should* have changed. But it didn't, and I More...