Paolo is certainly the most known Italian blogger, besides being a successful entrepreneur. He’s has a good international reputation and a strong network of relations. Recently he wrote an article about Web 2.0 in Nova24, the new technological supplement of the most important economic newspaper in Italy: Il Sole 24 Ore.

This reminded me of how the Italian blogosphere reacted enthusiastically to Nova24 launch. This supplement gives lots of visibility to blogs: Luca De Biase, the Executive Editor, is a journalist but also a quite popular blogger, in their first issue they published articles from David Weinberger and two italian blogger, Paolo and Beppe.

But the Italian blogosphere was too kind not to mention few details: Nova24 is not available online, not even a summary or excerpts. It’s a pure paper product. The whole newspaper “Il Sole 24 Ore” has always had a troubled relationship with the web: it recently discontinued the online edition that was previously available only to subscribers of the paper edition. Now it offers just a selection of articles from the newspaper and the related news agency. It sells more than 400 thousands copies daily, it’s backed by the Confindustria the powerful employers’ association. but the people running it just don’t get the Web. They didn’t with Web 1.0, maybe they now have a chance to jump directly on the Web 2.0 wagon …

It is certainly a good sign that a mainstream media interacts with bloggers, but “Il Sole 24 Ore” badly needs to develop a more sound and consistent policy about its online presence and the integration of reader-generated content.

Fred Wilson is thinking aloud about the information landscape and how it will be affected by RSS feeds. A very thought-provoking piece.

I’d be interested in talking to any entrepreneurs who have interesting ideas how to profit from this new world of feed ubiquity we are going to have soon.

David Weinberger, besides being the brilliant writer that gave us The Cluetrain Manifesto and Small pieces loosely joined, is a strategic marketing consultant, a very good one. And, as long as I’m aware of, he always spent his capabilities to advise innovative companies (Interleaf, Open Text, …), using new tools and creating new scenarios (see the Howard Dean campaign).

But few days ago, he wrote this endorsement post about HighBeam

Thanks to RageBoy’s Chief Blogging Officer gig, I’ve known about HighBeam, but it’s only as I buckle down to some serious writing that I’ve discovered just how great resource it is.

Since he’s definitely an A-lister, I jumped to check this “great resource”. What a disappointment! HighBeam is an old style aggregator, a database of magazines, journals, … In this categories there are hundreds of similar products. Most of them are bigger collection than HighBeam (Ebsco, Dialog, Factiva, Ingenta, Elsevier’s Scirus, …)

The new idea behind HighBeam is to seduce the blogging community giving them a “Blog this article” link. Click on it and HighBeam will generate the html with the citation info. Every blogger with a valid HighBeam subscription could link to papers and articles not freely available on the web. Cool? Definitely not!

Endorsing this marketing approach is not enough, so David Weinberger go on and promise:

I will be using HighBeam a whole heck of a lot.

Fantastic. I hope this won’t affect his way of blogging. The small pieces fo HighBeam are not even loosely joined to rest of the Internet. Isn’t this a menace to the conversation?

I’m not saying that since HighBeam is a commercial venture, the blogosphere should reject it. I would just prefer to see bloggers supporting the Directory of Open Access Journals, the Arxiv database, the Project Gutenberg collection, …

This projects can contribute to strengthen the connections between the blogosphere and the academia. Maybe we should all campaign to ask the bodies behind these open access initiatives to release tools specifically designed for bloggers. Today is not that easy to cite an article stored in the DOAJ database or an abstract from PubMed. Not to mention linking to a specific paragraph from a book in the Project Gutenberg collection.

Furthermore we cannot rely anymore on huge public institution efforts, like the one from the National Library of Medicine that gave us the PubMed repository. The failure of PubScience teach us that only project supported by large communities will survive, otherwise we will always see big corporations stopping everything with disruptive consequences for their markets. PubScience died because of Scirus.

I hope David Weinberger will lead this campaign to promote public access initiatives to his fellow bloggers!

This figure is the Technorati ranking for Clipperz. Since our blog has “0 links from 0 sources”, I guess that we share this ranking with about 13 millions other blogs!

Thanks to Dave Sifry for sharing the real numbers of new posts indexed daily by Technorati: 900,000 post per day. This is the blogosphere.