Favorite columnists still in the fold

Don’t panic. I offer that reassuring mantra, cadged from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, to the many unnerved readers who wrote me last week bemoaning the disappearance of their favorite columns. Or as one reader put it: “Are you mad? Where’s Off the Record? What happened to Enterprise Insight and Ephraim Schwartz? The last column I can find is from late March.”

Well, I can’t necessarily speak to the charge of insanity. But just because we’ve stopped print publication doesn’t mean we’ve cut back on our content. All your favorite print columns and columnists are still alive and well at InfoWorld.com. They’ve just gotten a slight change of address and been reborn as blogs and bloggers. Off the Record’s first-person IT war stories now reside here; Tom Yager’s Ahead of the Curve can be found at here; Ephraim Schwartz’s Reality Check lives on as a blog; and the curmudgeonly Cringely has re-pitched his virtual tent as well. The sole column holdouts from the print magazine stable are Dave Margulius, whose Enterprise Insight column still resides under the InfoWorld.com home page COLUMNS tab, and yours truly, whose editor’s letter (as in, what you’re reading right now), is still technically a column and newsletter, found here.

Our mistake was not putting up prominent “We’ve Moved!” signs on all the relocated properties. We now have pointers to each of the transferred columns on the InfoWorld Columns page. Or you can find our entire slate of bloggers under the BLOGS tab at InfoWorld.com.

So what’s the difference between a column and a blog? Not much, really. The distinction is mostly semantic. In many places, blogs are a bit more freeform and less formal and the postings can vary greatly in length. At InfoWorld, though, I see little difference in voice or approach between the two, especially since readers can leave comments on both columns and blogs. The prime differentiator is probably scheduling and frequency: Columns (and newsletters) always appear on set days; blogs appear whenever the spirit moves the blogger and they tend to be updated more frequently. Over time, all of our columns will likely move to the blog format. If you have an opinion on blogs vs. columns, leave a comment here or join me this Tuesday in InfoWorld‘s IT Exec-Connect for my discussion on the transition from print to online.

Speaking of user comments, we’ve just launched our regular Best of Talkback feature, highlighting some of the week’s most interesting reader postings. I hope to be reading many of your comments there over the coming months.

Finally, random thoughts: Driving on 101-S toward the San Francisco Airport last week, I couldn’t help but notice an enormous billboard proclaiming “The Algorithm Killed Jeeves.” I’m assuming this is the work of Ask.com, the search company formerly known as AskJeeves, which fired once-helpful butler Jeeves sometime last year. How convenient. First “the butler did it” (a mystery novel convention if ever there were one). And now some mathematical procedure has eliminated the prime suspect. Smells fishy to me.