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?

Why print ads cost more

Call me a dinosaur. I was on the train this morning, and I realized why printed news will always be more powerful than the Internet.

As I rode the Orange Line, I was looking around at my fellow constituents of Massachusetts State Sen. Dianne Wilkerson, who was arrested yesterday on bribe-taking charges, and as I thought about all the people of Jamaica Plain and Roxbury, the magnitude of the news sank in. Sure, the news was 24 hours old. Like everyone else, I had already forwarded it to my friends and talked about it at the water cooler. But this morning, I knew everyone on that train had read the same headline that morning, and seen the same sordid photos (even if only on the Metro.)

As an advertiser, you can't buy that kind of impact on a computer screen.