After having so many readers in the past week, due to links from Quote, Boekblad and VillaMedia (thank you Jan Dijkgraaf), I remembered a speech from Jacques de Leeuw, founder of Audax. It was approximately 11 years ago. It was a New Year speech or a speech at the Tilburg University, do not remember exactly. At that time he already spoke about the changing world in the publishing industry.

He said that everyone was more or less a publisher these days (1998). The word BLog was not invented yet, but more and more people were placing articles on the Internet. It is interesting to see that on one hand he was so right and maybe was far ahead of his time, but on the other hand no one expected it too take so long. At the end of the 20th century most of the people in publishing believed that newspapers did not have any right to exist. Within 10 years they would have been disappeared and moved to the Internet. And this is not the case as we know now.

As I said earlier on this Blog about reading the newspaper electronically, newspapers do have an added value and will remain having that. That goes also for the magazines. Printed media will not disappear as long the electronics cannot meet the look and feel of real printed paper (the smell they will for sure never meet!). Of course a weekly magazine can not compete with the speed of the Internet, with Twitter being the fastest news around yet. The late success of electronic publishing has everything to do with the fact that the cost of mobile computing has come down on acceptable levels and the devices are getting more and more sophisticated.

But there is a big difference between an article in a magazine or newspaper and an article on a Blog like this and that is Google Anlytics. After publishing a newspaper or a magazine, one knows how many copies were sold and where, but one does not know which articles were read and which were not. With Google Analytics I can tell you it is much easier. I know on every moment of the day how many people visited my Blog, where they come from, which operating system they use and which browser. How they browse through my Blog and how many (and which) articles they have read. And also where did those viewers come from and where do they go from here. That’s why I found out already at an early stage that the sites mentioned before made links to my Blog. I hope I did not scare you, I will keep this information for my own files.

Jan Dijkgraaf asked me on Twitter if I was already making money, having so many hits. But I am not making my Blog for getting much traffic on my Blog I can get, but only for fun and being able to write things here I want to tell the world about. (for the short messages I use my Twitter). I would not want to be accused of having a sponsored site. No, you cannot make donations either! Keep reading my Blog. Put a RSS feed on it; subscriptions are also free.

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