It’s not just about sludge pumps and flush-o-meters. A publisher’s perspective.

Just returned from the Buying and Selling eContent conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, though my staff questioned if I really attended the seminars when they saw my tan. The conference attendees included professionals from the publishing, content aggregation, technology, and buyers of content such as corporate librarians.

One of the sessions covered new publishing technologies and models such as blogging. What surprised me was how many publishers have not embraced this interactive medium. Though publishing has, from its earliest days, had editorial sections and letters to the editors, blogging seems to be misunderstood and mistrusted by the publishing community.

For me, blogs are editorial sections and letters to the editors on steroids. (In this case, it’s a good thing, unlike our recent baseball experience.) Often a publication’s editorial and opinion pages push the envelope on topics that are of interest to the writers. On occasion, they are a platform for passionate viewpoints. The letters to the editors are the reaction of the readers. They are a chance for consumers of the content to have a voice.

Blogs provide this important interaction between our writers and readers in an almost real-time environment. They also allow our writers to explore the areas of interest to our readers and give readers an opportunity to let us know if we are on target.

In the past, because we were limited to print schedules, editors would be forced to stay within the editorial boundaries of the publication. Our readers would read our editorials and stories but only a few would be so motivated to take time to write a letter to the editor, and due to limited print space, not all the letters would be published.

The Internet has unleashed our editors to explore topics and ideas they would not have written about in the past. It also allows our readers to respond and have their voices heard at the moment they finish reading the article or editorial. This real-time response mechanism has greatly increased the numbers of “letters” since there is no delay between putting down the magazine and making time to write the response. It has also allowed us to publish most, if not all, the comments made, an impossibility in the print days.

As we move forward, we will push the envelope on topics and ideas to engage our industrial readers and take them, for a moment, away from their daily grind of sludge pumps and flush-o-meters. We look forward to the feedback from our readers on whether we pushed in the right direction or we should be looking to other topics and ideas.

Blogging, like any technology, is not the “be all that ends all” for publishing. It is another way we can meet the needs of our readers. As always, we will be looking for new and better ways to meet your needs, but to do that, we need your feedback. So keep it coming.