That's the message that Robert G. Picard seems to miss in "Blogs, Tweets, Social Media, and the News Business":

Judging from their widespread adoption, it’s hard to find a technology that news organizations don’t embrace. Read the Los Angeles Times on Kindle.

"Technology Diminishes Journalists’ Value"Watch ABC News on YouTube. Leave a comment on a blog about media and marketing from the Chicago Sun-Times. Listen to a podcast of “On Science” from National Public Radio. Participate in a discussion board hosted by The Washington Post about college admissions. Receive SMS news about the Dallas Cowboys from The Dallas Morning News. Get features from Time on a PDA and tweets of breaking news from CNN.

The mantra for news organizations is to be anywhere, anytime, on any platform. But is this strategy really a good idea? In an era when the business models for news are stressed, hard thinking should be done in assessing the opportunities that various technologies present. It isn’t the time merely to be copying what others are doing.

Tough questions must be asked to figure out which of the new technologies is beneficial for journalism and the business of journalism. Is each one equally useful? What are the real costs in staff time and the operating costs to be on the various platforms? What is actually achieved for the news organization in being there? Does every news organization need to be active on all of the platforms? Finally, how can a news organization achieve optimal benefit across platforms?

The answers we find might lead to deciding which of these technologies to employ.

I beg to differ. The way I see it, it's all one platform, one technology. What Picard is talking about is really a matter of context, not platform. These things he's describing are not things, not platforms, but merely doors into the big platform.

After all, all of these digital means of consuming news feed off of the Internet, and the Internet is a lot more than just a delivery system. We connect with each other in this realm. We share information in this realm. We recommend to each other in this realm. And what we do in one context appears elsewhere. It's all interconnected. Networked. Internet-worked.

In fact, the Internet is not even the thing. "We" are the thing.

It's a mistake to think of Twitter and Kindle and blogs and so on as different "platforms." They are all tools of one big machine. Different levers and buttons on the big machine.

And this is all the more true when you consider that peer-to-peer is a strengthening paradigm into the future, as Andy Oram wrote recently:

Recurring outages on major networking sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn, along with incidents where Twitter members were mysteriously dropped for days at a time, have led many people to challenge the centralized control exerted by companies running social networks. Whether you're a street demonstrator or a business analyst, you may well have come to depend on Twitter. We may have been willing to build our virtual houses on shaky foundations might when they were temporary beach huts; but now we need to examine the ground on which many are proposing to build our virtual shopping malls and even our virtual federal offices.

Instead of the constant churning among the commercial sites du jour (Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter), the next generation of social networking increasingly appears to require a decentralized, peer-to-peer infrastructure.

What is a "platform" if you don't have a centralized nexus? Peer-to-peer is really people-to-people. And even on centralized systems working the net, the people are the content. We value our connections as much or more than the information.

If Twitter goes down, do we miss the news? Or do we miss the messages from the people we follow and trust? We are the machine indeed. Speaking for myself, the news I miss is the news those I trust are passing along. And the news I find interesting I want to share and recommend to others, and on and on it goes.

In other words, distribution of news is increasingly done through people, not "platforms." We are the distribution machine.

So should newspapers just continue to stumble around, blindly and awkwardly trying out distribution and promotion on all these different faces of The Machine? Probably not. But it's worth looking at these contexts, these faces, not as separate things but rather access points or doorways to the same thing ... us.

I don't know, what do you think?

Update: Chris Messina has a great post that explores this theme of a people-centric web.

Having just returned from DrupalCon Paris 2009 with mixed feelings as to how I forged my own experience there, I thought I'd put down some thoughts on conference attendance and participation — what (not) to do.

1. Don't minimize the jet lag factor.

   I had an 8-hour shift in going to Paris, and my first day there after touching down around 7am was pretty much lost in the fog. The second day was really my first day, and that would have been better spent having to myself to just settle in, check out my hotel neighborhood, find decent food, orient myself as to where the conference venue was, etc. As it was, I had to run off to the conference for my first day of meetings and such. I should have arrived a day earlier.

2. Don't stay at a hotel beyond walking distance of the venue, if possible.

   My hotel was about 2 miles from the conference venue, which turned out to be a manageable walking distance. I'm not sure I would want to have more than a 40 minute walk every day, so I peg the limit at 2 miles. But walking is great!! What did I gain from walking? I got to see and experience Paris during my "commute" to and from the conference. I had no tourism time, so this turned out to be a daily pleasure, even when it was raining. And on the 2 or 3 occasions where I needed to cab it for time, it was a short jaunt. (On the other hand, when I stayed in Barcelona, I was 40 minutes away by train, and that was a royal pain. It worked out because I had plenty of food and drink in my hotel area, and the conference was in a rather barrenly industrial part of town.)

3. Don't upgrade critical laptop software the day before leaving.

   I upgraded to Snow Leopard the day before, and I thought I was all set. Testing revealed no apparent problems that were critical. However, once in Paris I discovered that the slideshow I created in Keynote for looping on the pingVision sponsor's monitor at the venue would not export properly to Quicktime. (See related post, linked below.) I spent an entire day struggling with this. A day lost. Big #fail on my part. Never again.

4. Don't eat the hotel food.

   Look, do you eat at any hotel restaurants where you live? Enough said.

5. Don't bring the 17" laptop, no matter how much you love it.

   My back is killing me from carrying not one full-sized MacBoo Pro, but two — one to play the looping slideshow. Today I'm practically paralyzed with back pain. Next time, it's a netbook (or the rumored Apple touchpad) or just a smartphone.

6. Don't figure you'll be able to meet up with someone later.

   When you see someone you want to talk to, stop and talk. Right then. Don't wait. Of the half dozen or so people I ran into when I was intending to do something else and we promised to talk later, I talked with none of them later. The event may be a week long, but that is over quite suddenly. Talk to your friends, acquaintances, colleagues and other people you want to meet up with whenever you can. Be spontaneous!

7. Don't blow off the parties, no matter how tired you are.

   Some of the best conversations I had last week were at the "brown bag" party that just kind of happened on the Left Bank. The restaurant designated for meeting was too expensive, but that didn't prevent a fun party in the plaza right there. You couldn't know that in advance, either. In the past, I've been one to choose rest or work over socializing in the evenings of conferences, but that's been my loss. I don't particularly like loud bars and despise crowded meet markets, but there's nothing like conversation over coffees or beers or wine or a fabulous meal!

8. Don't forget about global data roaming.

   I bought a 50MB plan that more than covered my email and Twitter needs for the week on my iPhone. However, I noticed that when you sync your iPhone to iTunes, your global data gets turned on, even if you had it turned off. And if you had not planned ahead with a global data plan for the month, you could find yourself in for some surprising and onerous charges.

9. Don't get too wrapped up in your own shit.

   I don't know about you, but there's always stuff going on that demands my attention. Scores of "real" emails every day. Text messages. Phone messages. Project management issues. I let myself spend too much office-style time on those things, which prevented me from seeing far too many sessions. This is the biggest #fail on my part. You're there at the conference to meet up with people, connect with friends, learn what they're up to and discover new things. Your own stuff will be there after the session. Go to the effing session already!

10. Don't leave too early.

    Some may consider leaving early to be fashionable, like leaving a party. Some may consider leaving early to be expedient, figuring there's little of interest at the end of a conference. I left too early because I got my dates mixed up. I ended up missing the code sprint on the last day. If you've never been to a Drupal sprint, then you're missing out. At DrupalCon DC, it was my favorite day where I finally got to interact with others and even work on some templating code. Missing out on all that in Paris was a major bummer for me.

11. Don't neglect learning which is your airline's terminal.

    United's website did not tell me which terminal their flights departed from. United's reminder emails did not tell me either. So when I got to Charles De Gaulle Airport, I did not know where to go. The taxi driver either did not know or took my ignorance as an opportunity to inconvenience another foreigner, and dropped me at Terminal 2. Apparently the managers of that airport did not feel that identifying airlines on their maps was necessary. That airport is pretty confusing when you don't know what you're looking for. A helpful person at an information counter explained to me that my taxi driver had dropped me at the opposite end of the airport from where I needed to be. 30 minutes later I finally got to the check-in counter. Next time, I will not be so complacent.

12. Don't forget about the post-con blues.

    It happens to me every time. I get down after the event, after riding a week on all that energy and excitement. And when I get down, I run through my regrets -- the people I didn't meet, the dumb things I said, the food I shouldn't have eaten.... The blues are blue enough without all that extra baggage. Which is why I'm writing this blog post. I want to savor the joys, and not get distracted by regrets. Therefore: these notes, mostly to myself, for next time.

I'm glad I didn't manage to fail on all these counts this past week, but I really need to work on my conference attendance planning and not just my conference presentation planning. I will do better at DrupalCon San Francisco!

Do you have any other conference attendance suggestions?

First, I want to say that I love Snow Leopard. This latest OSX (10.6) is wiki-wiki! All the more so on my SSD MacBook Pro. I log in and within 2-3 seconds I have desktop, ready to go.

But to be honest, it has not been a bug-free experience. Which is why I read with amusement in the Ars "review" (which really isn't a review, more of a background piece) that Snow Leopard was a no-new-features/no-new-bugs release. There are new features, which others have covered more than adequately.

There are also new bugs. Or at least the new OS has shifted enough that apps declared stable and supported on Snow Leopard may be supported but certainly are not stable, in my own experience.

And it's only been since Saturday, so my experience is thin. But in that time I have spent a lot of time in Apple's own Keynote app (iWork '09) and Adobe's InDesign CS4.

They both crash. A lot. To provide context, in both apps I am working with modestly large documents. My Keynotes tend to be graphics heavy. Maybe on the high side of normal usage by people in general. But this is Apple's own product. I have resorted to saving after each change I make, knowing that at any moment, anything I do could make the app go poof! and disappear, without even leaving a note.

I have lower expectations regarding Adobe's InDesign. Since Snow Leopard came out ahead of what most developers expected, maybe Adobe got caught off guard. But when it comes to InDesign, I am doing rich document work, not magazine layout. These should not be pushing InDesign anywhere near its limits.

But InDesign has become my fickle friend, collapsing on me when I do something innocuous like a cut/paste.

In both cases, my gut tells me that this could be related to memory management issues of Snow Leopard itself. I have 8GB of RAM, but copying things from Word to put into InDesign would kill InDesign. When it comes to Keynote, however, whether it's the app or the OS, this is on Apple.

I'm going to keep investigating settings, and if I come up with anything I will post an update from the bleeding edge.

I now own two recumbent bicycles: a HP Velotechnik Street Machine Gte, which is short, and a Rans Stratus XP, which is quite long indeed.

I got the Street Machine last weekend, purchased at my "local" recumbent bicycle shop that's 50 or so miles away in Fort Collins: Spring Creek Recumbents.

While recumbent bicycles are not exactly unknown or unseen in the bicycling mecca of Boulder, there isn't a single bike shop that sells recumbents. I don't know why.

In fact, Spring Creek seems to be the only serious recumbent bike shop anywhere in Colorado. I'm just glad they're in relatively easy driving range.

They're also very knowledgeable and friendly. They have dozens of models of recumbents and even quite a few trikes. And they have quite a few that you can rent by the hour, so you can try some of the models out for extended periods before making any buying decisions.

Anyway, twice before this spring I went up to Fort Collins to test ride some of the various SWB recumbents they had. I confess I was lusting in my heart for a SWB bike.

Don't get me wrong. I love my Rans Stratus XP. I've ridden quite a few miles on that bike, considering that it's been largely winter since I bought it. But I wanted something shorter. Lighter. Easier to maneuver when not riding (e.g., when parking it at the office).

So now that I've done a bit of riding on the Street Machine (which yes is a pretty dorky name – what you may or may not expect from a German company), I can say that it is definitely quite different from the Rans.

No surprises there. For example, the riding position on the Street Machine is a bit more compressed than on the Rans, which has me working different muscles, which I figure is a good thing. The Rans is really more like sitting in an easy chair with pedals. The Street Machine is much more of a sport machine.

What did surprise me was that the biggest adjustment for me would not be the higher bottom bracket, which has me pedaling much higher off the ground, or the under-the-seat steering (more on that below), but rather the short wheelbase with the small front wheel.

Every time I hit a deep dip, such as the rain gutters that cross the street in a nearby neighborhood, I get this feeling that I might actually endo on this thing!

The feeling is exacerbated by the front fork shock absorbers, which bear the brunt of the shock but leave the front end of the bike dipping a bit further than I'm so far comfortable with. I trust the engineering, so I figure I just need to get a bit more accustomed to this feeling, but it was something of a surprise.

One feature I love, though, is the under-the-seat steering. This tends to bring the front wheel back up under the rider a bit more than more "conventional" SWB bents like the Bacchetta Giro, but I liked being able to relax my arms while steering.

And, I confess, the pivot joint at the head stem of the handlebars typical in the SWB made me very uncomfortable.

Spring Creek had configured the bike with the mesh seat, which appealed to me as well.

The final decider for me on the HP Velotechnik vs. the Bacchetta Giro, which was my other leader, was the full suspension. It really makes a difference on the regular bumps and seams you get on streets and bike paths. I'll just have to get used to the feeling on the bigger dips ... and avoid them when I can.

All in all, the HP Velotechnik Street Machine Gte is a wonderful ride. Doing some Googling for this post, I found Bentguy's post on his own, where he says:

I ride an HP Velotechnik Street Machine Gte... (ooooh, sounds cool). It is cool. It's a short wheel base recumbent with full suspension and rides like a lazyboy on rockets. It's as fast as a bike that is this comfortable can be. And it's a mule in that it can carry a ton of crap... and I do.

I'm going to be using the Street Machine as a commuter bike, and the Rans Stratus XP for longer rides. At least that's what I've been thinking. But the HP Velotechnik Street Machine Gte is billed as the ultimate touring bike, so maybe I'll be changing my mind in the coming months.

First, some context

Henry Porter, an opinionator granted a regular podium by the Guardian, has written a bit of a rant claiming that we're victims of Google, a "monopoly."

Google presents a far greater threat to the livelihood of individuals and the future of commercial institutions important to the community. One case emerged last week when a letter from Billy Bragg, Robin Gibb and other songwriters was published in the Times explaining that Google was playing very rough with those who appeared on its subsidiary, YouTube. When the Performing Rights Society demanded more money for music videos streamed from the website, Google reacted by refusing to pay the requested 0.22p per play and took down the videos of the artists concerned.

It does this with impunity because it is dominant worldwide and knows the songwriters have nowhere else to go. Google is the portal to a massive audience: you comply with its terms or feel the weight of its boot on your windpipe.

The article is full of these kinds of claims, all largely based on what seems to be either a complete misunderstanding of the nature of the Web, or a lack of understanding of the word "monopoly."

The core of Porter's ignorance, willful or not, is revealed in this statement:

Despite its diversification, Google is in the final analysis a parasite that creates nothing, merely offering little aggregation, lists and the ordering of information generated by people who have invested their capital, skill and time.

This is true only if you think that things exist on their own, and that their relationships to you, their relationships to each other, do not exist, or are not worth looking at, let alone making available for use -- let alone making relevant to our day-to-day lives.

Google provides a means of finding relevance in that sea of stuff out there on the Web. It's like a mega-index of the "book" of the Web. That relevance was largely hidden from us before search engines. To find relevance, one had to ask friends, browse libraries, analyze the Dewey Decimal System, dig up Yellow Pages, rummage through desk drawers to find that one tidbit of information you want right now.

That is hardly "nothing."

In 1787 Thomas Jefferson wrote: "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter."

Thomas Jefferson was also against a strong judiciary, which in hindsight sounds pretty foolish, imho. But Jefferson aside, there's no indication that what newspapers are in function -- delivery systems for filtered information -- is not going anywhere. It's just the newspaper industry, and the infrastructure and market that enabled the paper to be printed, that is going away. News is still happening. It's just that how we're getting it is changing.

There is a brattish, clever amorality about Google that allows it to censor the pages on its Chinese service without the slightest self doubt, store vast quantities of unnecessary information about every Google search, and menace the delicate instruments of democratic scrutiny.

I don't like how US-owned search engine companies are going along with the Chinese Government's restrictions on the Internet, either, but let's be clear: It's the Chinese government that is censoring the Internet. Google is going along with it, along with much of the rest of the American economy, let's face it. This is about corporate collaboration with government constraints on what we consider "American values," and not about a Google monopoly or how Google is anything but pretty darned typical these days.

Now in many ways Porter is like many other people who have enjoyed the privilege of being given a special podium from which to pontificate and opinionate, who is upset that the market is shifting such that people who haven't been given such privilege are able to not only publish, but actually find an audience for what they publish.

How dare they? "Those bloggers!" is the cry we've heard over and over, often while pointing to the most outrageous or inane examples as cases-in-point -- ignoring that the vast majority of people "in print" also tend to produce an abundance of useless, inane, erroneous, misinformed information as well.

Until search engines, the only filtering agent people had was the editorial board of the local paper or the book publisher or the magazine. Now our filtering agent reaches beyond those sources -- although those sources, when right, get the most relevance -- to include others, including people who never went to journalism school, and never were given a paycheck by a media conglomerate. Oh the humanity!

So now Google is the dominant search engine, and thus potentially is a huge influencer in what sources we can find to be relevant to our needs, wants, desires ... to our lives. Such power Google has!

But is Google a search engine monopoly? Really?

Remember in the '90s? What was the dominant search engine then? Yahoo. Microsoft, with all its market dominance on the desktop, really was having trouble competing.

Google pushed Yahoo aside. How? By providing better search results. You searched Yahoo and got some good results and lots of spam and pr0n. You searched Google and got better results.

Relevance was the ticket to Google's successful insurgence. And relevance is why Google still dominates.

Relevance is a commodity. Nobody owns it. Nobody controls it. Relevance is not even a scarce commodity. There's always more relevance. Better relevance.

Want to defeat Google? Build a tool that gives better results. In other words, be more relevant than Google.

Yes, Google has a magnificent physical infrastructure worth a crapload of money.

But even in these hard economic times, there are plenty of craploads of money out there to build a new tool to defeat Google. It wouldn't even take a huge crapload of money, as craploads of money go, since server infrastructure costs are going down.

No, the scarcity is in the innovation. The imagination. The engineering to guide what that crapload of money would build.

Microsoft has been trying and failing, and nobody can accuse Microsoft of being short on craploads of money.

It's the relevance that Google has, and it has it only ephemerally. All it will take is a tool with more relevance, backed by a relatively small crapload of money, to whittle at Google's market dominance, or even knock it off of your default home page. Maybe it will be a new search engine. Or a new social media paradigm. Or something we haven't even imagined yet.

All we know is that we don't know what it's going to be like just a few years from now. Blaming Google for that is like blaming the weather vane for this afternoon's rain shower.

Hat tip to Dave Winer and others for Tweeting the Guardian link.