12.07
Back in 1930-something early radio folks like Walter Cronkite figured out very quickly that reading the newspaper on the radio didn’t work. Radio was an audio medium and newspapers were not.
Yesterday I sat through a demo from a company who had a really slick product that put your newspaper’s PDFs online and they had all this cool navigation and searching and whatnot. It looked just like the newspaper and you even flipped pages all Kindle, er, newspaper like.
From a technology perspective it was impressive. From a strategic perspective it was a joke. It was the 2007 version of reading the newspaper on the radio.
The web is not a print medium folks. Yes the web has a printed media aspect, but there’s so much more to it. There’s other, non-print media (“multimedia”) and there’s, you know, “linking”. The physical paper has none of that, PDF or no. There’s certainly no mechanism in the physical paper for microformats or anything like that.
That this product even made inroads — and it did because they supposedly report to ABC for circulation numbers — tells me that we’re still thinking like newspaper people… in 1935.
