I’ll be the only South African blogger not to write about Jacob Zuma today. Instead, I’ll rabbit on about my other pet subject: newspapers; or rather, I should say, the future of news.

Posted some thoughts on online adspend on my blog today:

Excerpt: "Those figures illustrate better than anything the conundrum facing newspaper proprietors. They are being told, day in and day out, that their industry is dead, or will be soon. Yet their business makes about 20 times as much money as the business which is supposed to be replacing it. "

http://robertbrand.wordpress.com/

Comments?

Some thoughts on the future of newspapers. I'd appreciate your comments!
http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/robertbrand/2009/03/18/those-who-want-new...

There is a good post on thoughtleader about how to magic up a new facebook. Anja touches on the most important thing about the web today: It is no longer about the content or the tool, but what you let your users and fans do with your content or your tool, or the tools you provide with your tool, for your tool. RSS opened the doors for content to be shipped around every which ware. One of the most successful games published was Quake, because it let you change things, customize, mod, reshape, remix. Larry Lessig of Creative Commons understands this, the open source movement is based on this premise, the movement towards mashups speaks about this.

A recent Dilbert captures my thoughts on the hype around "web 2.0" quite nicely:

click the image to go to the Dilbert home site.