In a past life, I worked at Xerox which for many years cowered in fear of the impending “paperless office” trend. After decades of waiting they decided to go find out what gives and their study discovered that people were still printing as much if not more than they were before. “Decentralized printers, y’see,” said Cosby. Whatever.

If Scoble’s kid winds up “literate,” he’ll be piloting jetpak-stroller before that media dies off.

—> Duck — here cum da McLuhans!

WebPub futures prediction requires a ridiculously complex multivariate analysis. Dead tree periodicals are more easily understood. I think you nailed it with the predicted shift from daily-blat to magazine-style reportage. This may actually be an improvement over today’s nonsensical simplification of complex national and global stories by the dailies. WebPub will fill in the gaps with immediacy and editorial reflection, with community and entertainment.

Scoble quotes himself as saying that his kid will never read the papers, and of course that’s child abuse right there. But he’s wrong anyway, no matter how much techno-foot-binding is going on in that household, because the papers will still be there even if they are all pixels and no ink.

I think the industry that is more likely to shrink and morph out of existence as a direct result of WebPub is broadcast news. CNN is already dead because the “who’s callin the tunes” has turned them into Fox Jr., and CNN, Fox, ABC, NBC, and CBS have narrowed their effective bandwidth and coverage so much that they look like the broadcast donkeys in the movie “V.”

WebPub was a whole new thing 15 years ago and it is moving along nicely, broadening its reach, refining its offerings, synthesizing new genres, and generally moving so fast that both the hoosiers in the Citizen Journalism community and the old barf bag bloggers who sidelined themselves in their onanistic tech-reflective dead-end for the last ten years have been, if not left behind, at least declared irrelevant.

Tangential note, I like the Kottke post quoting Hedlund that you linked a few days ago that said, “One of my favorite business model suggestions for entrepreneurs is, find an old UNIX command that hasn’t yet been implemented on the web, and fix that.”

“you’re the man now dog”

“This is a story about a couple of self identified “bloggers” contriving to disagree with a fellow who didn’t say what they said he said about a story that is so old it pre-dates the ARPAnet.

Answer: “what high-profile bloggers do on a slow news day.”

Frank, as the wireless, data-packeted tendrills burrow deeper into our future generations, doesn’t the all news is local thing gain more and more traction?

Anyway, I’m thinking, with all the immediacy of the all-news networks and innanets an twittrz an wot all, newspapers, if at all viable, will have to lean more toward magazine style “in-depth” reporting to stay relevant. The Newscos will have to support it, it cannot go away.

MSM is “call,” Blogs/nets is “response” (but who’s callin the tunes is another thing entirely)

In other news, dog bites cable guy installing Neutrality Traps — dog dies of blood poisoning.