The Brave New World of Journalism

Blogging has become an important part of my life. Hugh Hewitt’s radio show got me interested and his new book Blog helped me get started. The tools from Blogger.com made it all very easy, and it’s free for the basic service. It’s just amazing!

Now I find that blogs are much bigger than I originally thought. Friend Sue Morgan sent me a paper by her daughter Kathleen, CEO of the Otter Group, presented in Taiwan. In the paper “Winning the race for knowledge worker productivity,” Kathleen describes how access to instantaneous information on the internet has freed the knowledge worker from the confines of space and time. Productivity gains come from “empowering many and then from aggregating and acting on collective approaches to decision making.” She notes that 2004 was the “year of the weblog” (blog) when new tools for information management, publishing and aggregation became pervasive. There are now over 32 million American blog readers and 8 million bloggers like moi.

Zone bridge buddy Judy Floyd sent me a fascinating site from her daughter Jackie the geophysicist at Columbia University. The video by the Museum of Media History relates the history (and the future) of the new media. A few highpoints:

1989: Tim Berners Lee creates the World Wide Web
1994: Amazon.com launches ( a store that makes suggestions)
1998: Google search engine is born
1999: TIVO unshackles TV from time and
Blogger.com personal publishing launches
2002: Friendster social network launches and
Google News is edited by computers
2004: Google goes public and Sony introduces epaper

2006: Google integrates search, news and TIVO into the Google Grid
2007: MSN counnters with Newsbotstr personalized news
2008: Google and Amazon merge into Googlezon with total customization
20……. You get the idea.

I can’t wait!