What if I had blogged the cover while reporting?

There is something to be said about both. The interview with Eric Schmidt was great. Trying to get into long term strategic plans and business implications is also something you can't get into deeply via a blog post.

On the flip side, the story itself was ho-hum, in that it was old news. Of course, getting a businessweek cover story ratifies the excitement we had when the original news came out.

In other words, there are merits to both, but I believe the bar has been raised on traditional material, cause the story on its own does not quite have the same impact.

I suspect that the "right" answer is to do both: cover the "journey" online for readers who are just as interested in the back story and greater details that may be prone to being edited out of a print story and then release the distilled and refined "story" for those who prefer a more concise and crisp and professionally presented "story."

Online, we can follow along on your "journey" and actually get value out of dead ends, cul-de-sacs and greater detail that simply doesn't make sense in a print story. And, you get a chance to interact with readers along the way and get their feedback that may in fact help you write a better print story in the end.

In print, you and the editor get to have more careful control over the narrative flow and can produce a story that can leave the reader feeling that they just had a profound, insightful, and exciting experience.

Maybe one is technically "better" than the other, or maybe both in tandem is best.

-- Jack Krupansky

I like news online.

I like features offline.

I think you should have included the CMU information, or at least included it in a side bar. I'm also a little concerned about the tenor of the story. The concept of a shared cloud is being presented as if it were unprecedented - it isn't. Shared computing has been around for a long, long, time. Also the concept of opening up data centers to third parties isn't new. In fact, many billions of dollars were invested in this business model in the late 90s and early 00s - most of which eventually failed. What I find disturbing is that the article doesn't discuss any potential downside to this model (security? data integrity? etc. etc.) or even any technical or business challenges. I'd like to see a bit more even handed, less frothy, and more objective treatment of topics like this in future articles.

Sheesh... one air pump and pressure gauge coming up.

Gideon Rachman at the FT has adopted this approach of airing his initial thoughts on his blog and once he's got his head in order, writing it up into his column in the paper. Seems to work well. But then again he does have a roaming brief.

A magazine has a different focus. For those of us who aren't steeped in tech, it was wonderful introduction that both explained the basics and showed some examples of practical applications. What may be "old news" to some can still be new news to many.

That said, one of the things that's always driven me up a wall with magazine writing is the limit only so many words/columns/pages. Given the haiku limitations of the format, lots of good info gets cut. There are probably two magazines-worth of copy for every magazine you see. It's a balance between space, the popular mantra of "people have no time to read these days, so it's got to be quick and highlights-driven," and the need to tell a story that, frankly, doesn't get mired down in too many tangents.

But the web -- so much space on the web! Not to include those lost-in-print sidebars on the web seems ridiculous. Whether they're blog-as-you-go or saved for the "package" is a different issue. The whole concept of scooping has become almost moot. It isn't only a matter of a news cycles running so fast they run together, but also that there's so much media in so many formats, who can keep score? And does it matter? For the people much more familiar with computing issues, the story wasn't anything that special. But for those of us focused elsewhere, it was in fact a scoop...

Steve,

Your dominoes are glued to the ground here and won't fall.

Start with the first: If your editors, with feet firmly Elmered to the earth, realized that your story could be so much richer from online contributions -- and didn't think it somehow got spoiled by being online during the process -- then that would still make it a cover story, an even better story.

And then your big guys would still do the interviews, but they'd know that someone could call bullshit on them before publication, so they'd better be good. Better for the story.

And then readers would still get it in print if they wanted. But they'd also know well that the story couuld continue online after print. I started reading your story -- damned good -- online. Hadn't finished by the time I had to leave the house. Almost bought the magazine to read the rest on the train. But I said, naw, I'd just as soon read it online. Media are now about choices, not constraints.

So the domino you need to pry loose in this is the print editor. So long as they who control the lineup don't give stories that are created online cooties, then all is well in your hybrid world.

-jeff

Jeff, one problem is that print stories appear to work on a different economy, and get more time and resources. That said, I already have in mind a new series of stories, and they'll start online. We'll see if that makes them "too familiar" to get featured in a big way in the magazine.

Deepak, I'm assume from your comment that you already knew about mapreduce and hadoop. If you did, I'm sure the story felt old. I'm writing mostly for people who aren't at all familiar with the world of computing platforms for this type of distributed system. In fact, I felt it something of an accomplishment to get such geeky stuff into BW at all.

Dan, you're right. The story could have used a paragraph or two on the challenges and pitfalls. I'm thinking now about how I could have gotten the space to do that, or more specifically, what I could have dropped from the story in order to get more space. One idea would be to drop the narrative around Christophe Bisciglia. But without this person in the story, I wouldn't have gotten nearly as much space as I did. Maybe it's just something I'll have to write later.

You're certainly right that distributed computing is not new. What makes these clouds different, in my opinion, is their super capacity to store and sift through data at high speeds. It's something the search engines have, and it's gaining importance as the gap between the data we produce outstrips our processing power. That's why IBM, no newcomer to distributed computing, is teaming up with Google.

"Second, sources are not as likely to line up for the online serial approach (unless it becomes a phenomenon)"

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