Amid the state of upheaval that the newspaper publishing industry currently finds itself, Jack Schafer has written a fascinating piece looking at how newspapers’ tried to invent the web with their take-up of new media technologies, starting with experimental fax editions in 1974, and draws the conclusion:

“From the beginning, newspapers sought to invent the Web in their own image by repurposing the copy, values, and temperament found in their ink-and-paper editions. Despite being early arrivals, despite having spent millions on manpower and hardware, despite all the animations, links, videos, databases, and other software tricks found on their sites, every newspaper Web site is instantly identifiable as a newspaper Web site. By succeeding, they failed to invent the Web.”

Dave Winer reckons Schafer is spot on:

“A lot of it absolutely true — I thought I was in the ‘videotext’ industry when I started out in tech in the early 80s, so much so that I named my company Living Videotext. I made countless trips back to NY to meet with people at CBS and Dow Jones, to try to anticipate the kinds of authoring tools we’d need, and how news would flow in the new system we were anticipating.“

Jeff Jarvis heaps praise on the piece; Adrian Monck calls it part of the “ongoing story of journalism’s contribution to its own demise”.

Elsewhere on the web:

Om Malik welcomes the launch of Cisco’s collaboration software WebEx for the iPhone. Frederic Lardinois at ReadWriteWeb says the launch is a clear indication that the iPhone is gaining a firmer foothold in the enterprise.

Dave Winer has hit upon a cool new use for RSS; he’s sending an aggregation of posts by his blogging friends to Twitter. Stay tuned if you like the sound of that – Winer’s probably going to release the script for public use in future.

If you’re in England with a pebble to hand and a hankering to get out into the freezing air, there’s still time to contribute to Britglyph, one of the largest social media driven public art projects undertaken. Bruce Sterling blogging for Wired muses: “One has to wonder if the petroglyphs of our remote ancestors were also this geeky and whimsical“.