INQUIRER.net unveils blog network

Finally, INQUIRER.net unveils its blog network. Joey Alarilla, our resident game editor/blogger, admits he is the guinea pig in this project ;-)

Again you might ask, why do we blog? For INQUIRER.net, it is about extending the conversation with our readers. We get a lot of feedback from readers everyday. We hope to engage readers in a more, well for lack of term, interactive conversation. I've also been blogging for close to 3 years now. It started when my youngest daughter was born. Somehow, my blog evolved from being an online diary of my daughter into something more personal. It currently features my musings on blogging, technology, journalism, and recently, politics (since I cover the elections).

The INQUIRER.net blogs network aims to be not just any blog network. We hope to use it to make news your news too. And as Joey says, we also hope to take advantage of today's technology and use it to keep the conversation going. Happy birthday INQUIRER.net blogs!!!

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By the way, INQUIRER.net is currently co-convenor of Media Nation, a gathering of different news organizations in the Philippines.

Newspapers can't predict their future

This is not a required post, but I just want to share this with the rest of the class.

I picked up this story from The Editors Weblog. The headline says, "Newspaper executives can't predict future of industry." Indeed, it is also conventional wisdom now to think that the Internet is causing the "death of newspapers." But there is more to this ongoing trend. (Also read this related story from New York Times). Excerpt:

After years of endless discussions on the future of the newspaper industry, trying to figure out whether it will bounce back or is doomed, some top newspaper executives finally revealed the honest truth. They simply don’t know. These executives met at the annual media conference in New York – where The New York Times Co. explicitly refuted rumors about a change in their stock structure.

The ‘real news’ was the honesty that newspaper executives seemed to have agreed upon.

Tag that magazine

In the "spirit" of convergence, a Philippine magazine introduced a new marketing gimmick in their magazine. It involves taking "snapshots" (using a mobile phone camera and a special software) of a bar code-like symbol placed in the cover of the magazine. The Tag Mobile System (TMS) -- as it is called -- will take the mobile phone owners to a special website (a WAP site) that will contain other information and goodies. As this blog states, TMS is:

TMS is a convenient way to download any form of multimedia into your mobile by turning your phone camera into a barcode scanner.

Just imagine the possibilities. Magazines or any publication (actually the TMS works on websites too) can now push information via mobile phones. If you're using a smart phone, you could conduct transactions (say buy a product from the magazine or view more photos on your mobile phone). I remember an old article written by my editor Leo Magno years back. With convergence, content is now portable to any device/medium. With technologies such as TMS, content will be "spiraling" up and around all these mediums/devices. Thus he writes:

This consequently is redefining the word “media" as we know it. The flow no longer comes from a broadcaster’s or publisher’s point of view down to the audience, where the old communications model of sender-message-receiver is followed. Information flow in this day and age is no longer linear. With the participation of citizens -- the audience -- as both content consumer and producer, it has become multi-dimensional, spiraling up and around several evolutionary ladders of communications.