Blogs are dead, and so is news

In the early days of web 2.0, bloggers wore their distinction from stodgy news organizations as a badge of honor. The news organizations are proving the bloggers were right by keeling over. As they die, the blog/news distinction has lost its meaning. Today, after WaPo exec Katharine Weymouth yesterday said she wished Post ed's could write headlines like the Huffington Post, USAToday.com ran the flip headline, "Obama says nation needs more nerds."

News outlets are trying to be more like blogs, and good bloggers are building credibility by acting like news men and women.

But Google and other search engines persist with the distinction. Today, if you ran a Google Blogs search on Eric Hjerpe's move to Kepha Partners, you'd find a link to XConomy's story, but not the post I broke the news with in Mass High Tech early this morning. Conversely, a Google News search picks up our article, but leaves off the XConomy post.

So blog readers miss our article with news on Kepha's strategy, and quotes from Hjerpe and Kepha founder Jo Tango. News readers miss a link to an incisive column Hjerpe contributed on XConomy last summer.

Why shouldn't it be easy to get a quick look at both sources? When will Google discontinue their disservice to readers, and drop the meaningless blog/news distinction?

What does "out of context" mean?

Ticket Stumbler's Dan Hauber commented on today's Mass High Tech article, which mentioned his company as one of several that's going places with little or no VC funding (so far). Dan's comments said I took his quote out of context. It's true I left out some of the other things he told me - like the company isn't ruling out venture capital in the future. But I don't think that distorted the meaning of Dan's own words, which were, to his credit, frank and straightforward:

Medford-based Ticket Stumbler Inc. isn’t looking for venture capital at all. It isn’t using the cloud, either, but traffic on TicketStumbler.com, the event ticket resale aggregator’s website, is growing 50 percent a month.

“We don’t even have a financial model,” said co-founder Dan Haubert. “Just going that whole route is very time-consuming when we could be building and talking to our users and improving the site.”

I think that meaning is pretty clear. The company isn't looking for VC funding. I shall decline to comment on the photo (or the size of anyone's hands).