As I just mentioned in my Twitter stream, Mike and Scott from Atlassian, an Australian wiki developer we have written about in the pages of the AFR, are pictured in a Business Week yarn on young entrepreneurs.

Aussie startups take note: The profile piece on BW’s slideshow makes no reference to the fact they are Australian. And that’s a good thing, because geography doesn’t matter. Forget about traveling to Silicon Valley and trading on Brand Australia.

Two telling quotes from Time Inc’s mass sackings (NYT story here). 

Denial is eventually exposed as a non-strategy:

Mr. Hackett told employees that the cuts were “brought upon us by some real cold hard facts when it comes to how this business is run, and how media is changing.”

…and a sign that employing lots of journalists doesn’t figure when it comes to just relying on capitalising from the clickstream generated by big events:

People magazine’s investments in its Web site, for example, appear to be paying off. After the Golden Globe awards this week, people.com broke its own record for traffic in a single 24-hour period, with 39.6 million page views.

This NYT piece caught my eye and made me smile, particularly this observation by a Journalism graduate:

"Newspaper people are too pessimistic," he [Diego Sorbara, who is graduating shortly from the Missouri School of Journalism] said. "Part of the nature of journalism is to adapt to your surroundings. We can’t all stay in our ruts. If you get into this whole spiral of, ‘Woe is us, the industry is going down,’ then it will go down."

I’m not going to say a word, beyond suggest you get a copy of today’s AFR if you still can. Big report on the newspaper fightback. Contains juicy, fightback-type quotes like this from APN executive Brendan Hopkins: "Newspapers are not dead and will never be dead."

I chatted briefly to Cameron Reilly today - he’s gonna have a field day on this one.

This yarn about PC World allegedly engaged in circulation inflating activity caught my eye today.

The suit, filed in federal court in Brooklyn on behalf of Boston-based software company Teletype Co. Inc., claims PC World and a top magazine official, Shawne Burke Pecar, conspired with defunct Valley Stream distributor Inflight Newspapers & Magazines and an industry auditing organization - the Audit Bureau of Circulations - to inflate the magazine’s paid circulation to charge higher advertising rates.

The article doesn’t state that PC World is owned by IDG Communications, my former employer. The company didn’t make any comment about the suit, but it seems to me this accusation is very much out of character with the IDG culture that I know. It’s essentially a family company, with CEO Pat McGovern owning up to 60 per cent. He’s the kind of guy who personally delivers thousands of North American employees their annual Christmas bonus, and remembers their names. At the same time, he’s got an incredible memory for figures and keeps a very, very close eye on the business. So it all just seems a bit odd to me.

But on the other side, you have this interesting dynamic where the US PC magazine market is now dominated by just two magazines, PC World and PC Magazine. In contrast, here in Australia, we’ve still got way to many: PC World, PC User, Australian Personal Computer, Atomic, PC Magazine, and there’s probably others I’ve forgotten. Anyway, the point is when there are just two publications the competition is intense. Who knows if that was a factor.

Now, I’ve got a lot of time for Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s COO and chief spruiker. But I’m starting to really question the Schwartz editorial overload.

I’m at work today on my rostered Sunday duties, and was surprised to find this Business Week piece penned by Schwartz. He’s also a frequent contributor to the very fine AlwaysOn, and this interview looks like his latest - it picks up on the same electricity/computing is a utility story that he’s been selling for years now.

So linking those two examples together and doing a quick bit of introspection, I think what’s bugging me is that it’s not that I don’t like what he has to say - in fact, quite the opposite - it’s that he’s so prolific. Now, there’s nothing wrong with being prolific. The ability to generate tons of copy is one quality that gets you a long way in media circles. What’s wrong is that he’s completely out-gunning traditional competitors. We don’t hear enough *directly* from the Ballmers, Ellisons, Page/Brins of the world. Schwartz is proving that if you start talking openly, honestly, and directly - even though it’s clear you have a commerical agenda - you’ll get attention because there’s a massive conversation void out there waiting to be filled.

Much is being said in the PR realm about Om Malik’s Technorati scoop (eg Steve Rubel and Matthew Podboy). At the risk of sparking a journalist vs blogger debate, there’s something worth clarifying here.

The biggest difference between this scenario and any other scoop by a journalist is that Om broke the (great) news on his own blog, rather than a blog or website hosted by his employer (although it doesn’t look like Biz 2 is chasing hard news on its site these days).

To all the PR people wondering how this particular case changes the PR game, let me say this: it doesn’t change much when it comes to dealing with journalists. If a journalist has a scoop, and can break the news in any medium that now includes blogs, they will do it. And things like embargo negotiations should still apply to blogs - although I’d suggest PR’s start checking.

What we are expecting to see change is the rise of bloggers (who don’t have a day job as a journalist) breaking stories before journalists. That scenario is already well documented and that’s what should be worrying the PR establishment. You thought journalists were hard to control…

As I ripped off the plastic around the latest Technology Review to hit my desk today (gasp! I’m enjoying the print version), I noticed a plug for Bob Metcalfe’s Nick Carr rebuttal “Why IT matters.”

Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet, a VC and IDG board member, used this article to try and end the Carr hysteria once and for all. He (a little too emotionally) argues that if business leaders end up believing Carr, he will “run their companies –and our (US) economy – into a ditch.”

I also like this insight:

Many commentators have debunked Carr’s article since in appeared last year…But Carr’s article just won’t stay debunked.

When I read those sentences, I remembered a post I made on InfoWorld’s TechWatch blog last year, quoting John Cleese who chided developers at a Sun conference:

“The crap architecture (you built) contains major management flaws that only you can fix. Clever, but sly.”

One of the great mysteries of our industry is our reliance on products that time and again prove to be unreliable or complicated. And so we are forever obliged to keep repairing and improving those products or the whole system comes unstuck. It’s not perfect, but it’s how IT works.

So this is where I feel Carr’s approach comes up short. I agree with Metcalfe:

If business executives follow Carr’s advice, who will provide innovation’s test beds? How will new technologies find their markets?

It’s a fact of life that not everyone can buy mature IT products. Someone has to go first. And in doing so will have some form of competitive advantage – and who knows for exactly how long?

Perhaps one of the reasons why this debate will not go away is because Carr has attacked the fundamental principles of how the IT industry at large operates - and will continue to operate.

So will Metcalfe end the Carr debate? I don’t think so. But you know what? Given all the healthy signs of growth I see around the industry, I don’t think it matters, so to speak.

My first EIC at InfoWorld, Michael Vizard, used to argue that a market is greater than two and less than 10. By that definition, RSS advertising looks to have become a real IT marketplace with eWeek now in the game pioneered by InfoWorld. As Steve Rubel observes, eWeek is running its RSS ads as a separate entry. So you’ll be scanning headlines in your newsreader and stumble across a clearly identified advertising headline that, if clicked, takes you off to the full text and/or associated vendor links.

Matt McAlister at InfoWorld argues in a comment on Steve’s post that readers don’t like dedicated ads in their RSS feeds, and would rather have them embedded within individual entries.

Now that we have two US IT publishers experimenting with the model, we’ll start to get a sense of who’s right based on repeat business and blogger feedback. My hunch is they are both right.

The digital convergence battle is supposed to be Microsoft vs. Sony. The New York Times (rego required) argues otherwise, suggesting Apple’s got the brains to rethink the home entertainment/gaming/smart home market.

“Steve Jobs has a better chance than many of the others to rethink the idea of personal media in the living room,” said Richard Doherty, president of Envisioneering, a computer industry research and consulting firm. “I know his iPod design team has been busy working on new products.”

The world is out to eat the US’s technology lunch, according to Business Week.

As more brilliant researchers steer clear of the U.S. and more and startups appear in emerging economies, a worldwide technology race is taking shape. And it promises to be a marathon.