Invitations and Becomings

Mark Cuban makes at Blog Maverick makes a terrific point about the wrong way for traditional media players to move into the digital content market.

You can call it blogging. You can even call it something else. The point I didnt make clear enough in my previous post, is that it has to be something else. No matter the quality of the writer, its just another stab at an audience in a medium where there are no barriers to entry. Its just one more example of the newspaper business following everyone else onto the web and doing exactly what everyone else is doing, but expecting they will be better because they are "The big paper". Thats a huge mistake.

This perfectly complements what I've been reading in Wikinomics. There the authors argue that IBM was smart to embrace an Open Source operating system (Linux) and http server (Apache) precisely because this was an area in which it had NO competititve advantage. Incorporating these open source products into its business offerings undermined the benefit its competitors could derive from their own products.

Blogs have effectively done the same thing to traditional news sources. By forcing them to compete as blogs, they've undermined the natural advantage of expertise and institutional resources that traditional news enjoyed.