San Jose Mercury News
broke the news on Friday that Forrester is launching a print magazine
next month. Matt Marshall points out how Forrester is joining the
company of four other new pubs (actually two new, one revival and one
re-vamp)--Tech Confidential from the folks at TheDeal, Tonhy Perkins'
AlwaysOn "blogozine," the next generation Red Herring, and MIT
Technology Review. He poses a good question in light of
grassroots journalism and Internet publishing advances: Can these new
tech mags survive?
Forrester Magazine's goal isn't to make money. Rather, it's to build
the brand of Forrester, which provides research on business and
technology issues. It won't carry advertising and will start with three
issues per year....The company's research found that the more senior
the executive, the less time they spent reading online, Kardon says.
Thus the decision to go print-only. It will be more of a business
magazine than a technology magazine....Forrester Magazine will be sent
only to executives of companies that pay around $30,000 a year for
Forrester Research.
Some branding move. Sounds pretty exclusive to me.:) Forrester analyst and blogger, Charlene Li, provides further insight defending the multi-channel branding approach.
Here's an interesting development in the blog world. First, Martin
Schwimmer, an attorney and publisher of The Trademark Blog, asked Bloglines to
remove his RSS feed from
their site.
It was brought to my attention that a website named Bloglines was reproducing
the Trademark Blog, surrounding it with its own frame, stripping the page of my
contact info. It identifies itself as a news aggregator. It is not authorized
to reproduce my content nor to change the appearance of my pages, which it does.
Then Scoble
responds.
What is different about Bloglines than, say, NewsGator? Is Martin
saying I can't look at his writings in ANY news aggregator, or is he
discriminating only against online news aggregators? I say: if you don't want
your writings to be republished in a news aggregator, don't publish an RSS
feed.
Then the blogosphere
responds--including A-listers like Dave Winer--and a division forms over the
issue of RSS and copyright control.
Then Schwimmer
clarifies his actions and Scoble captures
blogger reaction (moreso in his favor). Finally, Scoble
justifies his stance.
The dynamics of this exchange are intriguing--a seemingly nobody
blogger vs. an Alpha. I would imagine that an analysis of the blogosphere
response to this exchange would portray the majority on the side of Scoble, even
though Schwimmer has every right (and a good argument) to ask for the removal of
his feed from Bloglines. Why is this? And why haven't some, who would normally
be vocal on a topic like this, spoken their mind. Would it have been different
if the tables were turned? Hmmm. Bummer though for Schwimmer's 190
subscribers--they'll have to be doing some old school Web surfing.