Inside Interop Blog

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We’re only a couple of weeks away from Interop and MBX New York 2008! I’m pleased to say that we have an amazing array of speakers and sessions within the conference this year. We finalized our conference content in early June and I've been working with our track chairs since then, recruiting speakers and fielding many many inquiries from companies hoping to speak at Interop. Long process but I'm really happy with the level of diversity of companies and expertise we were able to accomplish. We've finished our speaker recruitment efforts now, so I encourage all attendees to take a look online and get an idea of which sessions/workshops they’d like to attend.

I’m particularly looking forward to several panels. Is Green About Ecology or Economy in the Green IT track features panelists from the Green Grid and Eaton’s Electrical Group, plus a very interesting story about a collaboration between BigFix Power Management and Miami Dade County Public Schools. In fact, Miami Dade was recognized as an InfoWorld Green 15 winner for its deployment of BigFix Power Management. The Green IT track also features a great session from Verdiem called Green PCs - Power Conservation is Not Just for Servers. And while I’m on the topic, I should mention that one of the many ways we’re attempting to be more “green” as conference producers, is by no longer printing all of our workshop course materials. For the first time this year, workshop attendees will receive CDs with that material instead. Very cool development.

Another must see for me is the iPhone in the Enterprise panel, in the Enterprise Wireless track. We have speakers from Salesforce, AT&T and IBM, and it’s being moderated by Nathan Clevenger, the Enterprise Editor of Smartphone Magazine. And for a preview of the future of everything related to mobility, I would highly recommend the MBX Plenary: Wireless: So Much Left To Do. The panel consists of 5 highly regarded analysts who will be taking audience questions.

The Virtualization track’s Reducing Desktop Management Nightmares Through Desktop and Application Virtualization features panelists from Microsoft, Symantec and Citrix, and if you’re still getting up to speed in this area, definitely attend the Virtualization Technology Primer taught by one of our track chairs, Anne Skamarock. You won’t be disappointed.

I also highly recommend attending any of the sessions in our Cloud Computing and SaaS tracks which are more robust than ever. Speakers in these tracks include CEOs and founders of several exciting companies in this area. Check out SMB SaaS: Levelling the Playing Field and Managing Applications in the Cloud . And in the Videoconferencing track, we have a panel with speakers from the 4 leaders in the industry: Lifesize, Polycom, Tandberg and Polycom called Video Conferencing Overview - Where do I Start?. If you’re unsure about how to deploy videoconferencing in your enterprise or don’t know which product best suits your needs, this panel should answer some of your questions.

I just tripped over an optimistic jobs report from Robert Half Technology. More CIOs still say they're hiring vs. firing. Furthermore, when you dig into the results of RHT's latest CIO survey, you see that CIOs in the Middle Atlantic region are the most optimistic about adding staff. That's a nice surprise and i'm looking forward to hearing first hand at Interop NY what's making this region so strong. Also interesting in this report is a comment from RHT's executive director: “Organizations are directing recruitment efforts toward professionals who can provide essential services -- such as help desk and networking -- and support the launch of Web 2.0 based functionality.” We've been fans of Enterprise 2.0 for years and have focused on this area at Interop for the past three years. One of our keynotes Wed. morning, from IBM's Bob Picciano, general manager of Lotus Software and the Websphere portal, will once again bring attention to this important emerging area at Interop. Here again, i'm going to be curious to hear how our atttendees are helping to promote Enterprise 2.0 in their organizations.

This week's big news that the YouTube folks at Google acquired Omnisio is a pleasant reminder that there's plenty of room for innovation in the Net video space. InformationWeek's parent company TechWeb runs a lot of events (Web 2.0, Interop, Enterprise 2.0, etc.) and when we first heard of the Omnisio buy, we gave it a look-see given two very event-relevant features: First, the ability to integrate slide shows with video. Second, the way a community (e.g., event attendees watching a presentation) can drop comments into talk-bubbles at any time and virtually anywhere in the user interface. After my colleague Alex Dunne started an internal Omnisio thread, I responded with this mini-review:

For those that haven't had a chance to look yet, Omnisio is sort of like Twitter or IRC meets Internet Video+PowerPoint with a dash of TiVo tossed in.

At its core, Ominisio offers video of a presenter that can be synchronized with the presenter's slide show (there are two equal-sized panes...video on the left, slide show on the right). Today, when a bunch of Twitterers are sitting in on a presentation at technology events, they often tweet about what they're seeing with some very candid thoughts. Their tweets show up on Twitter.com (and wherever else those tweets are piped, usually via RSS).

Omnisio doesn't appear able to handle live Webcast videos yet. But as an event company, having Omnisio's functionality layered on top of a live or recorded session is exciting. That's because, if the presentations are Omnisio-enabled, instead of Twittering on Twitter where the feedback is completely divorced from the content, those same Twitterers could post their comments into Omnisio's translucent talk-bubbles that are superimposed directly on top of the user experience (the exact location within either pane is determined by where the user clicks -- see image below).

What's very cool about this is that Omnisio permanently makes a record of and embeds the comments in the video. So, the next person to play back a particular video/PowerPoint combination will see all of the comments that were made by previous viewers. Those comments will appear/disappear exactly as they did (and when they did) as when they were originally posted.

Additionally, all of the comments are listed below the player in a typical comment listing. But what makes the listing atypical is the sort order. Normally, the way most comment boards work, the most recent comment appears at the top or the bottom of the list. YouTube's comments work this way.

With Omnisio, the list is sorted according to where in the video's timeline it appeared, which means that the most recent comment gets inserted into the comment thread based on the video timecode that goes with it. According to Omnisio's FAQ, "Very soon, you will be able to restrict who can comment on your videos, but for now we want everyone to have a play around and familiarize themselves with the feature." Today, commenting is set on or off at the time of publishing into Omnisio.

Questions that come to mind (not answered by Omnisio's online FAQ): Can it be moderated? Not that Twitter can, but it's a fair question for people like event producers looking to draw community into their content. I've seen some Omnisio-hosted videos where the user interface is so cluttered with talk-bubbles that you can'y see the content underneath it.

Can it be integrated with other infrastructures? For example, can all of the comments be piped into Twitter and vice versa? My sense on this question is that the answer will be no because Google (NSDQ: GOOG) isn't going to want to support Twitter (Twitter is a competitor to Google's Jaiku). On the other hand, maybe yes because, well, Google theoretically never does anything evil. But this would be cool to have comments somehow auto-posted so end-users (the community) can select the comment-publishing infrastructure of their choice.

Also, can the comments be RSS-enabled (as far as I can tell, they're not now)? To the extent that this is sort of like TiVo, you know that comments are going to continue to file in for, like, ever. Some people (including video publishers) may want to monitor that ongoing community activity without having to return to the video itself.

Via e-mail, I popped some of these questions to Omnisio co-founder Ryan Junee. His response?

The features you list were all things we had thought about doing. We are still figuring out the plans going forward, but there's a chance features like these will appear in some form or another.

Here's the screenshot:

With the exception of a pipe bomb I once saw on the news, I don't think I've ever seen what a regular bomb looks like. Have you? It's an important question because the TSA is apparently willing to confiscate something (in this case, batteries) that it knows isn't a bomb, but that it still considers a threat because it looks like a bomb to other people (other people that don't know what a bomb looks like). Writes Bruce Schneier of the incident...

the average person doesn't know what a bomb looks like; all he knows is what he sees on television and the movies. And this rule means that all homemade electronics are confiscated, because anything homemade with wires can look like a bomb to someone who doesn't know better. The rule just doesn't work.

Perhaps even more interesting is the part that got under Schneier's skin: the fact that the TSA issued something of a chest-thumping press release over the matter. According to the relesase:

Transportation Security Officer Scot Peele leveraged his training and experience when he detected the suspicious item while monitoring the X-ray image of the passenger's carry-on bag....The item in question was determined to be an empty metal bottle and a home-made battery pack...The passenger was an engineer and said he built the battery to power his DVD player for the long flight to Hawaii...the man surrendered it to Supervisory TSO Raiford Patterson and was allowed to board the flight.

Deserving of a separate post altogether, this battery-cum-bomb incident serves as a reminder that the federal government instituted new rules on Jan. 1, 2008, regarding rechargeable batteries in both carry-on and checked luggage. Earlier this year, while with a member of TechWeb's video team passing through the security checkpoint at an airport (he had lots of extra batteries with him), I asked one of the TSA personnel about the new battery policy and he responded: "I have no idea what you're talking about."

In some respects, neither do we. You'll need a degree in engineering to make sense of the online guidelines (pictured below).

We had a big push this year to actually keep track of some of our more common statistics and events that occur in the network. Fortunately for us ScienceLogic, our Network Monitoring and Helpdesk provider, not only tracked everything that went on, but dug out some of the more interesting values. Louis DiMeglio has posted them on the Sciencelogic Blog

There is some more information on the help desk due out in a few days, but one of the most interesting thinges we found is that by offering DHCP on the show floor our end user configuration tickets dropped to essentially zero.

You can read Lou's post here

Fresh off the success of Interop Las Vegas, Interop New York conference content does not fail to impress. The number of tracks at Interop New York has doubled since last year. We now have 14 Interop tracks - compared to 7 last year - plus 5 Mobile Business Expo (MBX) bonus tracks, which is comparable to the amount of education offered at Interop Las Vegas this past April. It's truly remarkable growth for a show that is now only in its third year. New tracks to New York include Application Delivery, Cloud Computing, SaaS, Governance, Risk & Compliance, Green IT, SOA and IT Automation.

The Application Delivery track allows for a deeper dive into the very popular Networking and Services track. I'm curious to see how the Optimizing Application Delivery to Branch Offices session does compared to the Branch Office Optimization session we did in Las Vegas, which had both very impressive attendance and evaluation scores. It was because of that high level of interest that we added the new Optimizing the Performance of Enterprise Applications session to the schedule.

The Governance, Risk & Compliance track explores an area we were only able to address in a peripheral way in the IT Security track at both Interop Las Vegas 08 and Interop New York 07. We realized it really needed its own track. The Security By Compliance - A Discussion of Information Risk Management's Greatest Challenge panel already has an impressive lineup of speakers including the Chief Information Security Officer from the Depository Trust Clearing Corporation, an analyst from Forrester Research and a Senior Product Manager from RSA. Security metrics and measures, knowledge management and information privacy will also be addressed in various sessions.

While the Application Delivery and Governance, Risk & Compliance tracks are a natural extension of core Interop tracks, Green IT, Cloud Computing and SaaS, represent a foray into a completely new arena for Interop NY conference content.

The debut of Green IT as a track happened at Interop Las Vegas 08 and the amount of interest from vendors and attendees was huge. Green IT content submissions made via the Interop Call for Papers were extensive. One session of particular interest to me in New York is Green PCs - Power Conservation is Not Just for Servers, with the President and CEO of Verdiem. Green IT will still cover issues around green data center/storage and cost model analysis of these practices, but we're excited to offer attendees information on power management policies around PCs as well.

In a real departure for traditional Interop content, we're debuting separate tracks for Cloud Computing and SaaS. Software related topics were first introduced at Interop Las Vegas 08 where we were co-located with Software 2008 and the response was overwhelmingly positive. The addition of these tracks really highlights the vast range of IT topics now being covered by Interop. Cloud Computing and SaaS are very hot, young topics. Information around them is constantly evolving and we want to give attendees access to as much of it as possible. We already have a very impressive array of confirmed speakers for both tracks from companies like Google, Salesforce.com, Amazon, Rackspace, Fortisphere, 3Tera, and Huddle.com. There are 11 sessions between these two tracks covering everything from managing applications in the cloud, to compliance and regulation in the context of on demand applications. The Big Migration: Moving the Data Center to On-Demand is a great session for anyone wondering whether their organization is really ready to make the move to the cloud and Using SaaS to Make Good Products Great is a must for information on how to use SaaS to give your product a new edge in the marketplace.

Tried and true Interop tracks like Storage, VoIP and Unified Communications, IT Security, Networking and Services, Data Center and Virtualization are also covering many interesting and new topics as well. Virtual Reality: Understanding the Security and Compliance Implications of Server Virtualization is a brand new session in the IT Security track covering issues around Virtualization. Joshua Corman, Principal Security Strategist, IBM Internet Security Systems will be teaching that session. Also, Reducing Desktop Management Nightmares through Desktop and Application Virtualization in the Virtualization track, addresses a new area for us around how desktop and application virtualization relate to server virtualization. The Virtualization Technology Primer is a great way to get yourself up to speed on all the technologies and concepts around Virtualization, and for a preview of Microsoft's Hyper V, which will be released this fall, you should definitely attend Microsoft Virtualization and Hyper-V - User Experiences. In the VoIP and Unified Communications track, I'm looking forward to attending The Future of the Voice Endpoint: Telephones, Softphones and Mobiles. How long until desk phones are eliminated entirely? What are the challenges? And for an in depth analysis of technology convergence and its impact on your IT processes and network architecture, we're offering the brand new Benefits and Impact of Technology Convergence in SAN in the Storage track.

All of our conference content and information on scheduling is now on the Interop New York website so I encourage everyone to take a look and start planning what sessions they'd like to attend. In the coming days, I'll be blogging about some exciting new developments around Mobile Business Expo (MBX) as well as Interop workshops and the ever popular CIO Bootcamp and NAC Day. Sign up for workshops, Bootcamp and NAC Day as soon as possible since space is limited. And enjoy previewing the Interop New York Conference online.

Someone just reminded me that we will have 3 Interop Shows within a 12 month period. (NY last year was in October). So I should be no surprise that we are already looking for people to help get involved with the next InteropNet.

Yes, that's right. You don't have the just spectate, you can participate in the design and construction of the InteropNet. Here's the deal.

Do you have mad network skills? Are you an uberGeek? Or are you just a hard worker who wants hands-on learning about the latest and greatest network gear, working alongside the engineers who make IT possible?

If you answered 'yes' to any of these questions, then there is no reason why would shouldn't apply to be an Interop Team Member. Each year we pick a handful of volunteers from all fields and walks of life. These select few get the opportunity to work, live and learn the technology and tools that adorn the halls and networking closets of Interop.

The process is simple. Create an account on our Volunteer Database, and follow the links to apply for the NY 2008 show.

Apply today and let Interop help you get your geek on!

Dennis Howlett has posted a blog on ZDNet that essentially disses next week's Enterprise 2.0 Conference where he's scheduled (apparently, against his will) to moderate a panel discussion on microblogging (you know: Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, etc). Enterprise 2.0 is a production of TechWeb (Disclosure: the parent company to InformationWeek). Howlett's blog is called Enterprise Alley. Alleys, including his, are where garbage is sometimes found.

Dennis' vector of attack is to judge the merits of the event on the basis of who its biggest sponsors are and on the content of the E2-related press releases crossing his desk.

Regarding the caliber and roster of the those sponsoring E2, Dennis piles on after Jevon MacDonald (another E2 panel moderator that's apparently coming against his will too) calls out some of the E2 sponsors for being drag queens ("old enterprise companies dressing up like [pretty E2.0 babes]"); a post that was apparently channeled by Vinnie Mirchandani (not an unwilling E2 moderator or speaker).

As if (a) an Enterprise 2.0 event is only about the introduction of social media to businesses (it's not, here's the list of other topics) and (b) the only discussion to be had at the conference is framed by the event's so-called Diamond Sponsors (to which he links at one point), Howlett writes:

In the meantime every man and his dog wants to pitch their shiny new stuff at me. I guess that's because I'm on the ‘media' list. I'm not sure how that happened but hey ho, even if I have yet to see a single approach that bears even a passing resemblance to the so-called 'new' social media.

I happen to love ZDNet. I spent 10 years of my life there and helped build it into the force that it is today. But to buy-off on Howlett's rationale is like saying the conversation on ZDNet isn't worth squat because of what one may think of the companies whose advertisements appear on ZDNet's pages.

Dennis seems to have conveniently forgotten that the majority of the event's highest quality content -- the content that helps drive the attendees' strategic thinking (as well as the questions they should be asking of the sponsors) -- is driven by the panels like he one he's moderating that involve no sponsorships whatsoever. Furthermore, given that it's an enterprise event, if he spends anytime wandering around his own alley, he'd find that most businesses are already doing business with Jevon's so-called drag queens.

Where else in our industry, besides the Enterprise 2.0 conference, can the architects of tomorrow's IT so easily challenge their existing solution providers with the disruptive thinking they just heard about somewhere else? For example, in a panel discussion like the one Dennis is moderating.

Or maybe their lines of questioning will be influenced by my Evening in the Cloud which takes place the night of June 9 (on the eve of Enterprise 2.0). It's a free 3-hour meetup, the first 90 minutes of which Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), Google (NSDQ: GOOG), and salesforce.com will be making their case (to some hand-picked CIO-types) for running not just some, but all of their enterprise IT in the cloud. Where else is that conversation taking place in a public forum? I'm still taking registrations. But judging by the number of people already signed up, you'd better get here early if you want a good seat.

Steve Wylie is the Conference Director and General Manager of the Enterprise 2.0 show. The buck stops with him. I asked Steve to answer Dennis' criticisms. Steve told me:

It's naive to say suggest the big software vendors don't belong at this conference. 99.99% of the people at this conference are customers of one or more of the big vendors. They have to hear the vision and decide for themselves. Is this something Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) can do for me or do I need to go to Atlassian or Jive?

My point is that events like these aren't defined by the people who pay the bills. They're defined by the thought provocation and conversation that results from having both old and new in the same room.

So, Dennis, if you're going to be so down on Enterprise 2.0 for successfully doing what no other event does and you don't want the architects of tomorrow's IT to incorporate some of your own well-informed insights into their thinking, then let me know and save yourself the trip. I'll gladly sit in because that's a conversation I most definitely want to be a part of.

While there's no shortage of events that you can attend to find out more about the various Internet-based substitutes for the solutions you might normally run on your own servers or in your own data centers, there's no event where the question "Can you run all of your IT in the cloud?" is being asked. That's the public conversation that I and other CIOs and IT pros will be having with Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), Google (NSDQ: GOOG), and Salesforce (NYSE: CRM).com at this coming Monday's free tech meetup in Boston. I'm calling it an "Evening in the Cloud" and you're invited to come, join the conversation, network, and enjoy a few cocktails on me. Details are below.

One year ago, there were a great many technical (and legitimate) objections to cloud-based computing. Judging by the comments on my recent post about throwing away your e-mail servers, some IT pros are still unwilling to consider the idea. But the major proponents and providers of cloud-based computing such as Adobe (NSDQ: ADBE), Amazon, eBay, Google, NetSuite, and Salesforce.com and others who are committed to the idea of the cloud have been hard at work to overcome those objections with all sorts of innovations.

For example, there are plenty of off-the-shelf or canned solutions available in the cloud, like the customer relationship management offerings from Salesforce.com and NetSuite. But one of the major objections to going "all-cloud" had to do with those custom applications running behind corporate firewalls. How do you migrate those to the cloud if the cloud itself isn't programmable?

Six to 12 months ago, that was a legitimate objection. Though far from perfect (or "shipping" status), today, Google, Salesforce, and Amazon all have their answers to that problem. Google, for example, is testing its Google App Engine: a scalable infrastructure that can host Python-based custom applications. Salesforce.com now has Force.com, a fully-programmable cloud-based platform that gives developers access to most of the same underlying functionality (databases, business process automation, security, etc.) that the canned app salesforce.com itself relies on. And for those that prefer to start with bare metal but that also want to be able to scale without having to build out their own data centers (and don't want to have to commit to annual hosting contracts with managed hosting companies), there's Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3).

The big three cloud players aren't alone. Similar cloud based platforms from smaller players are springing up all over the Web -- all targeting the same audience: businesses that are ready to migrate their insourced applications to the cloud, where the benefits of multitenancy, such as scalability on-demand and reduced cost (due to infrastructure sharing) can be had. Companies that come to mind are RightScale, Brightbox (a Ruby on Rails platform hosting service), Heroku (another Ruby platform hosting service), and Bungee Labs, a sponsor of this coming Monday's meetup that offers cloud-based (in the browser) application development tools as well as a platform in the cloud to run the apps built with those tools.

Between the canned services that already existed in the cloud (everything from search to e-mail to CRM), recent innovations (to handle the primary objections), the ability to composite applications by mashing what's already out there in the cloud into something new and different that's just for you, and changing attitudes, have we crossed the tipping point? Or is it still too hard to really go all-cloud?

To answer that question, we're going to emulate a giant customer visit on Monday night in Boston on the eve of one of the industry's premier enterprise IT events: Enterprise 2.0. Doing the "visiting" on stage will be executives from Amazon, Google, and Salesforce.com. Being "visited" on the customer side, we have:

• Carolyn Lawson, CIO, California Public Utilities Commission
• Mary Sobiechowski, CIO and Global IT Director, Sudler & Hennessey
• Richard Mickool, Executive Director and CTO, Information Services
  Northeastern University
• Richard Mark Soley, Chairman/CEO, Object Management Group

Also in the room, listening in like a fly-on-the-wall (and eventually getting a chance to participate in the conversation)? Hopefully you.

The format is simple. Amazon, Google, Salesforce (and perhaps one other) will get to make their case for why they think its time for the customers to consider going all-cloud with their IT. And like any real customer visit in some conference room taking place behind closed doors, the customers get to feed back with questions and comments, all with the goal of constructively moving the conversation forward. They, the customers, will be there with an open mind and, in some cases, ready, willing, and eager to move to the cloud. But, like any IT pro, they have their concerns and will be looking to get them addressed during our customer visit.

After about an hour of vibrant discussion between the vendors and the customers on stage, we'll open up the questions to you and other members of the audience for about 30 minutes. After that, we'll have a reception for about 60 to 90 minutes during which the folks on stage will jump down and join the rest of the audience for some shoulder-rubbing, networking, and more demonstrations over cocktails.

We have limited seating available at this meetup (approximately 250), which is why, if you're interested in attending, we're taking registrations online on a first-come, first-served basis. As of the time I published this blog post, we had about 170 RSVPs. So, there's still a bit of room left if you want one of the remaining spots. Most of the details are online, but here are the tops of the waves:

DISCLOSURE: Enterprise 2.0 and Evening in the Cloud are productions of the Live Events Group of TechWeb (the parent company to InformationWeek). In addition to being an Editor-At-Large with InformationWeek, David Berlind is also a General Manager with the Live Events Group as a result of his founding role in other TechWeb-produced events such as Mashup Camp, Startup Camp, and Energy Camp. Amazon, Google, and Salesforce.com (all mentioned in this blog), and Bungee Labs are sponsors of Evening in the Cloud.

In response to my last post (the one on why both the NY Times and Mashable.com were off-base about the connection between blogging and heart failure), several readers wrote to offer an opinion about the direction that the NY Times' coverage is taking. Have you noticed the dramatic background music being played on your favorite local or national news program? The river of graphic headlines on most big-league news sites? Some shortcuts in reporting being taken that certain news outlets would never have taken before? You can thank the Internet's....

...so-called long tail for the pickle that the established media is in, and having a hard time finding its way out of.

To be fair, every media outlet and every journalist, for that matter, has their great days and then their off days: days when they look back at the what went out that day and say, "We (or I) could have done better." I can also point to plenty of impressive and current coverage from the Times and Mashable.com. But when technology writers venture out of their comfort zone to discuss matters of medicine without even trying to report on the facts and a venerable brand like the Times lets it happen, you know the litmus test for integrity is changing. Thank the long tail.

Regarding the author and section (within the Times) of the NY Times story that I referred to, InformationWeek reader JohnJ wrote:

Matt Richtel is a technology writer, and he wrote this article in the paper's Technology section. He's not qualified to write medical articles, and should stick to subjects he knows about.

Reader NJ Mike wrote:

Just another example that the New York Times no longer deserves the respect or status that it once did. Just because it is not a tabloid and that it is published in New York doesn't mean it is a quality newspaper. The "paper of record" is anything but that title, which it hasn't been deserving of for quite a number of years.

An wrote:

As for The Times, well, most mainstream media is unreliable and full of shoddy reporters who don't know how to write. It's a dated system that no one wants to be a part of anymore, so they pick up whatever trash they can find on the street to write for them.

First, thanks to the small group of people who responded so far. Second, the call-outs above are only three comments and are in no way projectable. But each of them contains some shred of truth that, to me, as both an employee and student of the media business, is more demonstrative of the established media's struggle than not.

The second word in "media business" is business. My father, also in the media business, used to tell me how a media property (a magazine, a newspaper, radio station, etc.) is like a three-legged stool. One leg is your audience. The other leg is your advertising. The third leg is your content and editorial. If you weaken or pull out any one of the legs, the stool falls over.

This isn't true of all media properties, as some have a slightly different model (eg: Consumer Reports has no advertising). But thanks to the blogosphere and YouTube (where everyone gets a printing press or a TV station for free), the long tail is really giving the established media a thrashing.

Taken as a whole, the blogosphere and YouTube are basically media properties the likes of which older media properties never had to contend with before. If, in that long tail of the blogopshere, you find five sources of information that you really like, you are more likely to shift your content consumption time to those five sources rather than open up additional consumption time to accommodate the new content. That means shifting away from whatever you're regularly consuming today. That shift -- terrifying to most media executives -- is under way. For the most part, every minute you spend with YouTube or with some authoritative blogger's blog is one less minute you're going to spend with a previously relied-upon source of information.

This battle for eyeball and eardrum seconds forces the existing media to resort to things it might not have done 10 or 15 years ago in order to not just keep readers, but to grow their audiences as well. Growth? Yes. The last time I checked, the idea was to grow a business, not maintain it. But before the established media can return to growth, many outlets have to stop the bleeding.

Whether its CNN, The New York Times, or Mashable.com, the headlines, the presentation, the background music (where offered) are clearly more sensationalized. They're candy machines and, unfortunately, we live in a world where candy is preferred over a decent meal.

Some media properties have resisted this temptation better than others. But it's a very sad statement about media consumption as well (yes, you and me) since it speaks to what audiences are demanding (or what media execs think is working). Call it what you want (I've heard "Foxification"). It's a seduction to the dark side that, in reality, is no match for the long tail.

The proof is around us every day.

For example, on CNN.com, I just watched media veteran Larry King interview a man who claims to have shot video of an alien. The headline reads Space alien seen on video, man claims. I clicked only to find that there is no video of an alien. It's more like 10 minutes of agony for Larry King who, somewhere midstream through the segment, realizes he must summon all the experience he has to turn a nothing story into something worthwhile.

The absurdity is just as much my fault (for clicking) as it is the editor's (the one who decided to do this story) for chasing after my click.

Is this what the established media has come to?