Spooging Blog Features into Old Media
One of the most interesting things Tony Perkins alluded to was in the middle of his Q&A session, and I'm not sure how many people picked it up in behind all the sizzling flame noise.
If I heard him correctly, I think he said that he can foresee a day, not too far in the future, when many of the key features associated with blogs will start to appear on "old media" online editions.
Imagine, for example, reading the New York Times online and being able to comment at the foot of a story, have access to a permalink, and for them to have trackbacks enabled. Cool.
Makes sense, too. This is an entirely feasible future.
It also helps put AlwaysOn in context. Is AlwaysOn a blog? I'd say no (and it doesn't really matter whether Tony did or didn't say it was, btw).
It's a publishing engine in a more traditional sense - a new variant of e-Zine, perhaps. And it does borrow heavily from the toolset and mindset evolved within the blogging community over the last few years.
So it's not a blog, but it genuinely is interesting. And - if we look at it as a magazine first and foremost, just one that happens to have plenty of blog-like features; it might even be fair to characterise it as revolutionary.
It's just such a shame that Tony insists on using such horrible marketingspeak in describing the business model - calling it a channel with appeal to advertisers and talking about "leveraging" the medium...
