Is Publishing Dead?

I would imagine not, but Ray Ozzie votes “yes“:

PUBLISHING IS DEAD. Gone, a relic of the past, dead as a doornail, breathless, buried. According to police reports, one-way publishing was killed off by a technology – Weblogs – that has reshaped journalism forever. According to observers, there was formerly but a single effective way to get messages out to an audience – through major mass-market publications that possessed exclusive control of the final form of those messages. “Add Weblogs to that mix”, one highly-respected and influential journalist recently wrote, and an entire industry’s “world view was shaken”. Indeed.

Equally interesting is the fact that I found this post via a sub-genre previously unbeknownst to me: a PR blog – in this case the “Mudd PR and Marketing Weblog”:

I don’t believe publishing is dead, but print-on-demand technology for book printing, e-book technology and weblogs certainly have changed the publishing mix. These changes have inadvertently changed the way people get their message out, how they mediate and manage information and with whom they share information. Because these new publishing technologies allow everyone to have a voice, information managers need to be extra careful and more thorough when it comes to distributing information to third parties.

Interesting.