FOLIO: Personalities -- The Blog People Page

The current conventional wisdom states that people won't pay for content on-line. Even the Wall Street Journal, once cited as the model for premium content, appears poised to trade subscriber revenue for more advertising impressions.

The conventional wisdom is wrong, though, when it comes to online diet and fitness programs.

Look at Carmichael Training (promoted via Chris Carmichael's columns in Outside), Rodale's magazine-related fitness plans (including the Men's Health Personal Train More...

Google's announcement last week of their new Knol product sparked speculation about which online publishing models were marked for death. Post-bubble comeback kid Henry Blodget mused on Silicon Valley Insider:

"Google continues to take a page from the early Microsoft play-book: Take someone else's cool idea, do it better, and steamroll the competition. Next up: a human-generated Wikipedia and About.com (NYT) killer."

Google is taking More...

I was recently wading through the innards of Times business section when I came across this item:

"Video sites need to draw a minimum of 50,000 views a month before getting serious interest from advertisers, Dina Kaplan, a founder of the video-sharing site Blip.tv, told Daisy Whitney of TVWeek."

Inspired, I took a brief, unscientific survey of magazine Web sites and YouTube channels to try to figure out which monthly magazines are gaining online video traction.

Here are some leaders:

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In my capacity as Discover magazine CEO, I had lunch last week with a leading environmental scientist and blogger. After a brief but stimulating chat about the climate crisis, I steered the conversation around to my more parochial concern: Can I dramatically increase my Web traffic by adding more blogs?

He was skeptical to say the least. Incumbents in this market have significant first mover advantages. My friend launched his environment blog in 2004, a year before the Huffington Post but a good five years after Boing Boing. Since th More...

First off, I have not seen the new Amazon Kindle in person. (Note to self: send nasty note to Discover tech editor after finishing this blog entry.) From the pictures, though, the thing looks like a fantastically expensive Speak & Spell.

The reviews from tech geeks, however, have been generally positive, and the first run sold out on Amazon in five days.

So what does this mean for ink and paper purveyors? The classic print magazine argument goes something like this:

Magazines provide the More...

You can't swing the proverbial dead cat without hitting an industry panel discussion about the death of print, the transition to digital or some variation thereof. This has been true now for the better part of a decade. The panels just come with different titles:

1997: "Avoid Becoming Roadkill on the Information Superhighway"
2007: "The Magabrand Revolution”

Cycling through a number of failed strategies—homegrown portal sites, blockbuster acquisitions, digital editions—most publishers still have a hard time getting over the fact that branded, high-quality content doesn't seem t More...