My job as editor of Microsoft Watch concluded on April 30. From that ending starts a new beginning and repurposing. Can people really make a living by blogging? I plan to prove they can, but not in the way most bloggers pursue.

There is a place for tried-and-true principles of publication-reader relationships that the search engine obsessed new-old media has ignored. SEO doesn’t stand for search engine optimization, but search engine obsession—and it’s sure to bring many bloggers, journalists and news or mew media organizations to ruin.

Nicholas Carr’s post, “The writing is on the paywall,” is the most astute assessment I have read yet about the problems plaguing journalism today. He writes:

The essential problem with the newspaper business today is that it is suffering from a huge imbalance between supply and demand. What the Internet has done is broken the geographical constraints on news distribution and flooded the market with stories, with product. Supply so far exceeds demand that the price of the news has dropped to zero…The overabundance of supply means, as well, an overabundance of advertising inventory. So not only can’t you charge for your product, but you can’t make decent ad revenues either. Bad times.

Nicholas is absolutely right. News value is zero. There is simply too much of it. That’s the major reason I stopped blogging news at Microsoft Watch and shifted more to news analysis and news commentary. I hoped to add value that stood out from “the overabundance of supply.” The value loss there I intend to turn to gain here.

Journalism is undergoing a massive transformation exacerbated by the weak economy. People that blame the Internet shouldn’t. Change is inevitable. Technology reporting is good example. It hasn’t gone away, but changed. Sites like Boy Genius Report, Engadget or Gizmodo simply replaced older media—some of it dot-com 1.0 new media—with something else.

But the quest for readers has given way to an obsession with traffic. Click. Click. Click. It’s a topic I will write more about. This site—and what might later replace it—won’t obsess about traffic. The focus will be readers and building a community of them. You matter to me, not Google search. You.

I will continue to blog about Microsoft—and Apple. Also, there is Nokia, which global technology influence is lost on Americans—particularly iPhone-obsessed bloggers and journalists. But the writing will be much broader, too, particularly where technology, culture and lifestyle intersect. If you’ve come here looking for continued Microsoft commentary and analysis, you won’t find it. I need to send you somewhere else for it.

I am as of yet undecided about technology platforms. This first post was published on hosted WordPress. But I am considering TypePad for the advantages of its quick-and-easy publishing and promotion platform. I’m also thinking about more robust content management systems for which there can be community, such as Drupla or ExpressionEngine. It’s disappointing that EE development seems to have stalled at v1.6 (What happened to 2.0?). I would gratefullly accept any unsolicited advice about blogging platforms.

With that, I would like to welcome you to my new blog home—and thank you for stopping by.

[Update: On July 4, 2009 I moved to Tumblr and this new blog. This post was repurposed from joewilcox.com and subsequently updated. On April 30, 2010, I fully merged the old joewilcox.com site with Oddly Together on Tumblr.]

Do you have a story you’d like told? Please e-mail Joe Wilcox: oddlytogether at gmail.com.