By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

It gives me great pleasure to introduce a new blogger, Kevin Maney, technology reporter and columnist for USA Today. I ran into Kevin recently in New York where we were speaking at the Impact '05 conference, and he is in town this week for the Web 2.0 conference.

Kevin told me he will start blogging towards the end of October, and I think he also said that he will be the first USA Today blogger, but, I need to check that.

Kevin's blog will be under the USA Today brand, and he will continue with his regular daily duties and responsibilities.

This is not uncommon these days, other publications now demand the same from their journalists, that they "blog" for their employer, as well as keep doing their day job.

That's why mainstream journalists hate the blogging phenomenon because it is extra work on top of an already stacked-high pile caused by newsroom cutbacks.

But that's not why Kevin wrote a column in January that was headlined: "Chill, blogophiles; you're not the first to do what you're doing."

Here is an excerpt, and here is the link to the entire piece.

These days, Internet blogs are all the rage. Blog-related companies such as Technorati and Six Apart have people in technology hyperventilating like it's 1999. Blogs are ripping down mainstream media and the ruling class! Blogs give power to the people! Everything is blogolicious!

Jeez. Take a pill, all you blogomaniacs.

The column makes some fair points but its tone is clearly annoyed and frustrated, and very typical of many mainstream journalists, including myself when I was working at the Financial Times.

Paradoxically, journalists have tended to be the last people to "get it" in regards to blogging. We would see it exactly the way Kevin described things in his column, that it is just another way to publish things, a natural progression in lowering the cost of the printing press.

What Kevin, and myself missed however, is that the media technology that enables blogging, enables a two way communication. During Internet 1.0 we could broadcast our articles to anyone with a web browser. In Internet 2.0, we broadcast and receive back, and that is the kicker.

At the time Kevin's column appeared I said that such statements have a tendency to come back and bite-you-in-the-butt; there is never anything good to come from tempting the fates.

[That's why Google should change Do No Evil to something less fateful, like "Get 8 hours sleep every night and brush your teeth"--if the fates conspire against you, no harm done!]

http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2005/10/the_friday_wrap_3.php