Some really excellent advice here for publishers trying to get to grips with the structural change in the industry:
...let's think about what might happen when magazine publishing is no longer a river in its own right, but is just a current in the digital ocean. Magazines are starting to appear on the Web, but since they are just a number of interconnected pages in a world of interconnected pages, the boundaries between 'magazine' and 'not-magazine', or indeed between 'magazine A' and 'magazine B' are, from the Web browser's point of view, rather vague. Once we drop the idea of discretely bound and sold sheaves of glossily processed wood pulp from the model, what do we have left? Anything useful?
The thing is, that was written by the late Douglas Adams in 1999. And Alan has loads more vintage Adams that people still haven't got their heads around a decade on.
I'd be interested in hearing you expand on the point you're making, Adam.
The point was that there's some interesting, thought-provoking stuff
over on Alan's blog, and I thought people should read it. :-)
The wider point about content atomisation and the way the Internet is
structured is something I will certainly return to several times in
the coming weeks.
An extension of that idea is the blog which becomes a newspaper.