The Economist's Global Technology Forum is busy blagging inbound links from bloggers. I won't reproduce their email, but it's ever so polite and nice. It's the first time anyone asking for "link exchange" has ever got me to respond; but the Economist is an institution that deserves support. (Flattery seems to get you somewhere, after all.) Their Technology Quarterly is always a good read (can I have a free sub now please ;) ?). Anything that appears on the general news stand that isn't pushing some statist-corporatist-special interest slant is my kind of thing.
They've a nice little article for mainstream business folk on the pressures Skype face, for example. (Those wishing to dig deeper might like my pre-buyout thoughts on the evolution of Skype.)
However, they do need to refresh their journalistic approach for the 21st century. Hyperlinks cite sources, and many times bloggers are the fount of ideas and insight into market changes. The easiest way to attract inbound links from the blogosphere is to kick the process off by offering the outbound ones to the places you go to get the insights from. It doesn't cost you anything, and your value comes from filtering the best from the many sources, aggregating the right ideas, and applying the Economist's wand of truth and sense of liberty to the result. Blogs make good journalism even better. I'm not a journalist, and am not in competition with journalism. I don't even go to the effort of making my writing particularly accessible to a mainstream audience and spelling out every jargon term and all the background every time.
They're missing an RSS feed from this improved website, which is kind of fatal to making it a destination for people like me. Unless someone else links to an article, I just don't interact with the Web that way any more. It may be a minority sport grazing a hundred or more feeds, but those who pass the information around are the ones whose needs you have to feed. Check out our own Telco 2.0 blog for how to do it. We're making it easy to subscribe by RSS or email; the RSS link takes you to the splendid Feedpass service, which in turn guides novices through the process. We're experimenting with Windows Mobile access (via Hubdog) for busy execs. Every article has an "Email this" inserted by FeedBurner to help grease the wheels.
The main Economist site dumps all articles into a single feed simultaneously with the paper edition publication. There's obviously a long way to go there. At least unbundling the feeds would let me perform my own re-aggregation.
Why are we still struggling after all these years to get on the conversational Cluetrain?
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