Blogs, shmogs

Science students carried slide rules when I began college. Calculators were mechanical. They weighed a hundred pounds. When they did long division they sounded like a Vespa with a bad crank. Electronic circuits with dozens of transistors were not yet rolling off the line. Then the transistorized calculator appeared; it could add, subtract, multiply and divide, but it couldn't do tangents or cosines, so slide rule makers felt smug. Then a couple of years later, it could do tangents and cosines. The slide rule was dead. Slide rule makers never saw it coming.

If telco and cableco executives don't pay attention to blogs, they risk being slide-ruled out of the next generation of TV. At one cableco I know, the senior managers are all, "Blogs, shmogs, what's that Internet hippie stuff got to do with us?" They don't keep a blog, they don't read blogs and they don't listen to podcasts. They don't understand how podcasts evolved from blogs, or how this could have anything to do with them.

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