Robert Scoble on his own blog and TechCrunch have interesting pieces on the revamped Fast Company (a business/tech magazine relaunched a few weeks ago as Web 2.0 magazine/community) . I commented my thoughts on it, to the TechCrunch and Scobelizer posts today:
Sounds like an interesting experiment–and I’m joining, mainly because Robert Scoble’s there and sounds excited about it.
One part that does not make a lot of sense to me: Fast Company encourages you to start your own blog on their site. But most of the people with the most interesting ideas *already have their own blogs*. And why would a key influencer whose just starting a blog choose to affiliate with Fast Company to help them make a profit (rather than run an independent free blog, for which it will take more time for the accretion of readers, but will maintain your editorial independence)? Am I missing something?
Also, browsing members by Topic, Region or Industry does not work (which seems a little shabby, for a site that’s touting it’s technological prowess: cutting edge Drupal maybe, but missed basic QA…)
I’ll keep coming back if the content’s good and Metcalf’s Law starts to operate (the former seems a precondition of the latter). But I am getting sick of companies and publishers trying to “cash in” on blogs and Web 2.0. Smacks of desperation. (And I’m not counting Fast Company here, for the moment.) We already have distributed networks of like-minded readerships, organized by tags, searchable by Google, and aggregateable in our RSS readers.
For-profit aggregators of blogs and other content (like FastCompany an the new http://provideocoalition.com) really need to add value. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for value-adding for-profit aggregators: I consider the paper version of the International Herald Tribune one of them…)
So now I just see the take of another blogger at TechCrunch on it: Scoble Sells Out. Hmm.
Great stuff. indie2ezro.com si great.