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What happened to Britannica after Microsoft and Wikipedia killed it?

I have no idea - but naturally they've got a blog. This week the Britannica blog features a bunch of guest posts about the future of newspapers.

Jeff Jarvis and Terry Heaton quibbled with the process - a series of essays posted over the course of a week. Why, I don't know, but I took their bait and quibbled further.

Here's what I wrote via comments:

<blockquote>
Jeff, Terry, fair points, but geez, lighten up. Britannica (wow - now it’s a blog!) is attempting to curate a conversation and experience, and I think that’s a reasonable and worthy goal. I’m more bored and troubled by the topic than the execution. How long can “the end is nigh” conversation go on? Apparently: forever.

Packaging and dumping, err, publishing, a bunch of content all at once is also 20th Century, also known as a book, or a magazine, or a newspaper, or an encyclopedia. Curation here seems to be about process - recruiting and guiding the key participants, which seems to me has some value that’s also old school, and packaging the experience. What’s wrong with a series? What’s wrong with time as a factor of the experience? You want every episode of your favorite TV shows posted and distributed simultaneously? Or Terry, do you feel manipulated by drama crap when you have to tune in next week to Lost or Ugly Betty or Friday Night Lights?

I don’t have time read all of this at once. I guess it would be more productive for me to have someone else, like one of you, read everything, then summarize and link to the best bits.

Sure, this may be a modest attempt at curation. Maybe publishing everything at once would have generated a faster and bigger reaction and allowed more cross-references and links in the analysis. Maybe it also would have produced a massive and intimidating tome that few would have the time or inclination to read.

See, now you’ve got me blathering on about the process - instead of reading the essays themselves. Now I’ve got to lighten up!
</blockquote>

Tags: newspapers, future on 2008-04-08 and saved by 5 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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