Well, done, thought provoking article at: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/.

The first two paragraphs sum up the problem nicely: 

Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating
piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami
Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the
sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including
the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on usenet; a
2000-person strong mailing list also reading pirated versions; and a
teenager in the Midwest who was doing some of the copying himself,
because he loved Barry’s work so much he wanted everybody to be able to
read it.

One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was
Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I
remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old
kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates
you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.” I think about
that conversation a lot these days.

Add to that other disruptive forces, and I'm starting to think that newspapers won't be around in 5-10 years ... who will pay for something that is free!?!

I have written my last classic ASP app. Yes, I'll still modify existing applications, but it is time that I put in the time to fully understand the .NET framework. I've been able to hack around in VS 2008, to the point that I was able to modify an existing application's shipping algorithm to access a LTL Frieght API, but really don't have much experience going start-to-finish with an application. So today I'm downloading some of the sample SQL DBs, and will be dutifully working through the samples, concentrating on understanding the IDE and getting up-to-speed on creating winforms and ASP.NET pages. Silverlight seems interesting as well, but that will wait until I'm a bit happier with my .NET prowess.

Given that I still have other projects, I'll be spending a 30 minutes / day working through code samples, books and other resources. 

Codeplex has some nice samples: http://www.codeplex.com/SqlServerSamples for self-taught folks such as myself. 

A quick link out to Newssift, a news search engine produced by The Financial Times. The site uses semantic search technology, as well as a bit of analysis on the search results to create an interesting new product. While they don't reveal their content sources (and I wish they would at least provide a list of some sort), they have this statement on their site: "Newssift sources consist of thousands of global business news sources and millions of articles, spanning news portals, magazines, newspapers, news wires, research sources, online news, television and radio, and expert commentary."

I could see this being used for quick searches, current awarenes/monitoring type searches as well as to help refine searches and discover relationships between subjects. 

Check it out at: http://www.newssift.com/index.jsp.

Not everyone needs to spend a six figure expense to monitor reputation.

Marty Weintraub has a nice tutorial up at: http://www.aimclearblog.com/2009/03/16/how-to-build-a-reputation-monitoring-dashboard/ ... using free tools from Google and others to monitor info sources. This is nicely done.

While larger companies will want (and need) advanced analytics and filtering options (normalization of source names, for one), this is certainly worth pursuing.

DELETED!

Why would I want to approve a comment that:

1. Doesn't comment on the post it is linked to
2. Is obviously generated by some sort of bot
3. Links back to a foreclosure, or mortgage, or something similar

Why!?!

This is why we moderate comments ... this isn't a highly visited blog ... I have it up mainly as an exercise to force myself to keep current with info-industry events, products and trends. 

(and why did I just waste 5 minutes on this topic ... why!).

OK on to more important topics ... A. Roddick won his match last night against an Austrian (can't remember the name) ... some points were amazing ... 10 slices in a row anyone? Looks like my game on clay (if Roddick suddenly gained a lot of weight, and lost all of his tennis skills! <G>). Good luck to And, James and any other Americans still in the draw!