When I read something, I’m reading it alone. Many blogs and other WebTwoPointOh-y media give me the creepy feeling of reading a newspaper on a train with a guy peering over my shoulder. And carrying on a running commentary under his breath. With all due respect, I don’t know any of you fellow commentards and I don’t think I want to know your picks for the Oscars this year. I couldn’t care less about feeling all communityist with y’all than if you can hold my attention for five minutes of my time. I’m going to guess that once you scrub away concepts like “sharing” and “dialogue”, most people on the web feel exactly the same.

None of the neat WebTwoPointOh-y things that make us all members of one big community have made a dime for anyone but the geniuses who created them and sold out to the greater fool at just right moment. YouTube has more market share in online video than all of its competitors combined — and the smartest kids in tech still can’t figure out how to make money from what’s largely pirated content.

Old Media people may appear to be dinosaurs, but they at least have a track record of making millions, sometimes billions of dollars in their industry. That may be the economic equivalent of fighting the new war with the old war’s weapons, but a solid track record in a suffering industry beats the living bejeezus out of a string of unrelenting failures in an industry that is not only suffering but has so little to show for it after two busts in less than ten years that it’s difficult to consider it a serious industry at all.

As far as Conde Nast in particular goes, Portfolio.com is still a good read. Their recent article by Michael Lewis revisiting the world of Liar’s Poker in the aftermath of the meltdown was an example of fantastic writing, print or net (and for the record, I read it online). Wired is a little flighty but it always has been. I do notice they killed WebMonkey (which they brought back from the dead earlier this year), but honestly, I found that property so mis-managed as an end user that I deleted it from my bookmarks a long time ago. There’s really no reason that the link to the top article on the front page should 404… but when it’s on a site that’s about web development, that’s just comedy.

Let me aks you this: if you were an exec at a magazine company which makes 90% of its money (and I mean top- and bottom-line) from its print products and a recession is coming and you have to cut costs, would you have the guts to cut costs in the 90% income business or in the 10% income business (which is more a profit center still rather than a moneymaking machine). Of course it is short-sighted to stop development in online since that is where the money is flowing to. But not all and not today otherwise the 90%/10% division would not be there.

And about glossies: I truly believe that print will be around for quite some years and especially the special interest, shiny monthlies which are there to showcase (on your coffeetable for instance) and to flip through again and again.

Last but not least: if you read John Koblin’s piece well, you see that he mentions that there are magazine companies out there trying and trying hard. So it is unfair to take one quote from an anonymous source at Condé Nast and make it into “When will THEY learn” referring to the whole magazine industry.

If the economics of scale are removed from the printing process, the cost will stop being a mass-produced mass-distributed item into basically a specialist printout sent via regular mail channels (if there are any left!)

“The Web isn’t really a priority.”

…deserves exactly what they get.

conde nast might read up on nye lubricants @ the link above.