DotNeil.com

I don’t read through SkyMag every month, and I don’t watch much Sky TV, either. I don’t think either are bad, I just prefer the Internet. However, SkyMag, alongside Director, Supply Chain Management, Recruiter, and Management Today, are delivered every month to our house, and usually in subscription duplicates (I hope no one from the respective publishers reads this!). They inevitably end up smoothering the kitchen table, so I usually flickr through them at breakfast or when I’m snatching at things to do whilst waiting for my cafetiere to brew.

I’ve noticed one interesting trend, and it’s a first class, sterling idea by whomever thought of it first: Blogs are making their way inside print publications! Look;

It’s just brilliant. Take a phenomenon, which has only occured with the advent of the Web (is only even feasible on the Web), and put it inside a format which appears to be turning uneconomical due to Web (if you’re interested in a more detailed and experienced opinion on print versus Web economics, you should read Scott Karp’s Publishing 2.0 blog - I’ll leave it there for now).

SkyMag has a ‘Guest Blog’ feature, and as you may have noticed, this month we’re graced with a day in the life of Hugh Heffner. But, Playboy mansion insights aside, what else makes the blog-in-print phenomenon so good? Let me point out my favourite observation.

In my last post, My Newsfeed, the comments touched on the problems that cryptic icons and TLA’s can bring in technology adoption. Thankfully, SkyMag are helping the adoption of RSS standards by including an RSS icon at the bottom of the printed blog! So, not only will people not understand what it does, they won’t be able to interact with it, either! Hopefully, SkyMag readers will grow accustomed to the lack of interactivity when attempting to interface with the RSS icon on the printed page, and they’ll presume this is the norm on the Web, too.

After becoming completely inspired by all this, I set about finding my own way of twisting existing technologies together in the name of innovation. This is what I came up with.

My mobile phone, like a blog and it’s intrinsic hyperlinks and syndication technologies, is incredibly useful when it’s on the grid. So, seeing as we are in the game of mixing the online world with the offline world, I took my SIM card out of my mobile phone;

After five minutes in this state, I’m now thinking this is where the money is. Take the connectivity out of the connected technology!