Wired has a version of the age-old "Internet is killing the newspaper business" story. A good reminder that the next generation of IT execs is not loyal, or reading, print.

But while I too am obviously a major online news fan, I’ve gotta say there’s nothing quite as satisfying as consuming the weekend paper(s), a morning coffee and eggs benedict. Here’s to the hope against hope for the future co-existence of print and online.

Australian CEOs are apparently only doing half the job because they’re not giving communications and marketing enough attention (SMH story).

If this quote is true - "Communications is one of the most important and creative things you do" - then yes, give advertising some mindshare, but if you want to make a huge difference, try talking with people directly in the blogosphere. Go on CEOs, I dare you.

Ad execs at Australia’s biggest media sites were handed another excuse for door-knocking their clients today after this SMH report hit the streets. In short, the curious alliance that is PBL & Microsoft remains number one, while News falls to the fourth slot as Fairfax fills in the gaps.

The biggest change comes as Nielsen moves from counting aggregated site numbers to counting traffic at a specific URL - and doing so according to the term "unique browsers".

At IDG we market individual URL traffic, and have done for years. It’s the best way to prove you can reach a unique target audience and preserve your yields. But when you’re playing ‘biggest hits wins’, it’s a totally different (and messy) argument.

To cap it off, the article contains today’s Bleeding Obvious Quote Award:

Kevin Walsh, media director of online buying agency NetX, said: "NineMSN will be pleased, so will Fairfax, but News won’t."

Thanksgiving barely rates a mention in Australia, but if you’re a Yankee here or elsewhere have yourself a happy Thanksgiving! Eat turkey and pie until you can eat no more, and if you’re local I hope the cable TV offers some Foosball for the joys of post-lunch digestion/sleeping on the couch.

The Boston Herald offers this very alarmist report about the predictions of Stephen Roach, the chief economist at investment banking giant Morgan Stanley:

America has no better than a 10 percent chance of avoiding economic “armageddon.”
Roach sees a 30 percent chance of a slump soon and a 60 percent chance that “we’ll muddle through for a while and delay the eventual armageddon.” The chance we’ll get through OK: one in 10. Maybe.

Read the article and make up your own mind. Meanwhile, I couldn’t help notice the banner ad directly above the story’s gloomy "Economic Armageddon" headline that reads: "Want to Work in the USA?" Ah, well, gee, let me think about that…

..join the blogosphere. Congrats to HP for their small blog beginnings.

Reading the story on Computerworld Australia this morning, I couldn’t help but smile when I read quotes like this:

The company rolled out the blogs in a very low-profile fashion, Gee said.

"We buried it in the developer section by design because we want to get our feet wet," he said.

Sure, these are technical guys that presumably understand how blogs technically work. But the great thing about RSS/Atom is the blogosphere quickly becomes a level playing field as the sea of permalinks proliferate. Burying blogs within an HTML matrix won’t "hide" them.

The other background story here, as the CW story mentions, is HP has swung full circle - it’s gone from sending letters to Jonathan Schwartz about his blog, to starting their own blogs at a corporate level. That, of course, is what we’ve all been hoping would happen. Join the conversation in the blogosphere, not the legalsphere.

The last thing that springs to mind is some time last year I recall HP sent a bunch of researchers out to study blogs. I can’t find the link to the story (help anyone?), but if memory serves they were attempting to track the conversations started/propogated by popular bloggers and understand what influence they exerted. No doubt this was a communications or PR-team driven exercise designed to understand if there was a way to influence the discussion, perhaps in a similar fashion to the methods used to influence traditional media.

In that context, HP’s blog launch has all the hallmarks of a "strategic" corporate decision that could well have followed from that exercise. I just hope the corporate-backing (Mark Potts was "asked" to write a blog - by whom?) will not cloud their efforts. I’m hoping HP will loosen their collective ties, give the blogs a less corporate feel, and tell us what it’s really like working at HP. For example, is anyone at HP writing about these layoffs in an honest, open fashion that promotes understanding?

Primus has hopefully forced the hand of Australia’s major telcos with the launch of its 6Mbps broadband service. Based on ordinary ADSL technology, Primus is claiming all it’s done is open the tap to let ADSL achieve the speeds it was designed to enable.

PC World has the story from yesterday (I noticed it’s currently the top Sci/Tech story in Google News Australia), as does the SMH (sub req.) which lists the states and suburbs where the services will be made available.

Not only are we on the threshold of making a significant jump from today’s typical 1.5Mbps broadband connections, we’re actually getting close to the broadband mecca that is South Korea where 8Mbps is considered standard, and 20Mbps will be standard for 80% of households in 2005 - yes, next year. (Source: Google/CNet article from April ‘04).

The age of accessing high-definition TV and integrated services, or application services, on our desktops is just around a corner or two. Nice.

At the risk of looking really un-cool, I’ll mention his name and suggest that Nick (over-exposed) Carr is partly responsible for for what Gartner now sees as the "new CIO."

CIO Australia got a regional scoop to interview Gartner analysts about a new book on the subject of the new CIO. My observation is this latest round of CIO naval-gazing (perhaps it should stand for "Chief Introspective Officer"? is affirming one of the role’s central tenents in the wake of the Carr publicity: technology does actually deliver competitive advantage.

The twist is that according to Gartner, senior business executives are now refocusing on IT with that in mind - they don’t have a choice. In that context, the challenge I can see facing CIOs is how well they can blend IT skills with "strategic leadership" in areas like business processes and global business trends, since that’s the buzz that seems to matter in the board room (this week).

Some relevant quotes from the article:

In their new book, The New CIO Leader: Setting the Agenda and Delivering Results, Broadbent and Kitzis, who is group vice president of Gartner’s Executive Programs, argue that CIOs today stand at a crossroads, their role inevitably transforming under both the ubiquitous presence of technology in organizations and the recent technology downturn. CIOs will have to respond or else risk consigning themselves to oblivion. "They can seize the moment to leverage their expertise into a larger and more strategic role than ever before," as the authors put it, "or they can allow themselves to be relegated to the sideline function of ‘chief technology mechanic’."

***

"Standing still is not an option - every CIO will follow one of two paths based on these perspectives," the authors write. "The path influenced by the view that IT is irrelevant to competitive advantage leads to a role that might be called chief technology mechanic, a role ultimately no more prestigious than that of a factory floor manager. The other path, influenced by the view that IT is at the heart of every significant business process and is crucial to innovation and enterprise success, leads to a role we call the new CIO leader."

So glad to read BigPond has fixed its.. err.. "big" Australian Idol problem.

The Blogosphere Cause has much to say about the wonders of aggregating RSS feeds inside a newsreader. But ultimately an aggregator can’t do your thinking for you - only a real person can filter out the garbage and connect the relevant dots.

This Steve Gillmor post is a classic example of what I mean. Steve is also proving - whether he meant to or not - that regardless of what blogs are doing to traditional media, a paid role will always exist for those who can connect seemingly unconnected events into a larger, ongoing narrative.

And since I’m also catching up and connecting the RSS dots today, John Battelle is also good at creating a filtered narrative (see this example about Google and Trademarks from last week).

Update: Adam Bosworth has effectively aggregated a bunch of technology narratives (sans permalinks) in this speech, which is a must read (thanks for the link Chad). Some worthwhile quotes that illustrate my point above:

The value is neither in the computers nor in the software that runs on them. It is in the content and the software’s ability to find and filter content and in the software’s ability to enable people to collaborate and communicate about content (and each other). Who here really cares if Excel adds a new menu item unless it is one that lets you more easily discover information on the web, possibly update and interact with it or with others about it.

***

The currency of reputation and judgment is the answer to the tragedy of the commons and it will find a way. This is where the action will be. Learning Avalon or Swing isn’t going to matter. Machine learning and inference and data mining will. For the first time since computers came along, AI is the mainstream.

I find this deeply satisfying. It says that in the end the value is in our humanity, our diversity, our complexity, and our ability to learn to collaborate. It says that it is the human side, the flexible side, the organic side of the Web that is going to be important and not the dry and analytic and taxonomical side, not the systematized and rigid and stratified side that will matter.