One Thousand Articles Later...
March 26, 2009
Today's entry in the 3000 NewsWire's blog marks the 1,000th article in our news and community resource. For 10 years we took pleasure in reporting to the 3000 community on paper issues of the NewsWire, mailed monthly to offices, plus the Online Extra e-mails we transmitted in-between.
But we stepped onto a faster track back in June of 2005 with this blog. Less than a month later, the 31-year-old Interex user group slammed its doors shut overnight. I was never so grateful to have an every-workday news outlet to keep up with the collapse of a multi-million-dollar institution that was so close to the heart of the community. Sorry news for the thousands who lost millions of dollars, yes. But a blog was the best way to spread needed information in a confused time.
From 2005's "Less tangled SOX for 3000s" to this week's final resolution of that Interex bankrupcty, I've been blessed to have a community of wizards, gurus and wise-acres helping create all of that content. Sometimes it's just a quick e-mail reply that helps form an article; others come from an hour-long interview over Skype or even the regular phone. And you can find articles written by contributors like Gilles Schipper, Birket Foster and others. It's all in the archives.
One of the best ways to browse through our blog coverage is via that monthly archives page. It holds links to every month's articles, arranged in chronological order. Of course, the very best way to pinpoint what you need is through the search module, which is tuned to pick up articles out of the blog, or further back in the print-and-Web site era. Even those Online Extra e-mails are out there. We remain grateful to the man who helped us get our first articles onto the Web, solved countless problems since that 1995 debut, and continues to host the pre-2005 content: Chris Bartram of 3k Associates. (Chris has been online long enough to own a two-character Web address. There are less than 1,300 of those in the entire Web.)
We made a commitment to putting 3000 news online back in an era when the Web was novel. Blogging, and the engines that make it easy to concentrate on content rather than Web design, raised up our news platform for your computer platform. Blogging becomes journalism when you know how to create fresh content, in addition to relaying what somebody else reported. It's a distinction I think about every time I must devise each workday's article.
Getting news from online sources has changed the reporting game. If you follow the migration of media toward the online default, you may enjoy this column by Web and media analyst and professor Clay Shirky, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. In it he says the world doesn't need printed media, but it does need journalism. (And in a little bit of multimedia treat for us, we can even see him lecture at last year's Web 2.0 Expo.)
Online archiving will be one of the greatest preservation aids for the 3000 community. OpenMPE is likely to have material available by the end of this year from a wider variety of sources than anyone — although Speedware has licensed everything that HP would release for the 3000, documentation, articles, freeware and more. hp3000links.com is a great resource as well. Chip in the content on stalwarts like Adager, Robelle, Allegro, and the on-the-fly dexterity of somebody like Alan Yeo at ScreenJet, who organized the 2003 World Wide Wake, and you have a library at the speed of light to keep you educated and entertained in your enterprise.
Perhaps what's been the most fun in blogging (using the tools of Moveable Type, hosting at TypePad and the nubile software of the Mac) has been the multimedia. Podcasts, videos, interactive tweets through Twitter and messaging via Linked In — all of this has been a richer reflection of the color in your community.
We remain true to our roots as print journalists, even among the sweetness of tweets. Every quarter carries our best stories in a printed issue, which still arrives in mailboxes with some articles that haven't been seen until you unseal the envelope. Print practices serve blog journalism well, I've found. Something that looks old school, like a newsletter or the HP 3000, can still be the vehicle for new ideas. Thanks for reading them a thousand times over.