Spiceworks for IT professionals is also a hint of things to come

The immediate response is to blame the Internet (with its aggregation services and search engines) and the second is to engage in special pleading (where only print can support 'real' journalism and without it there won't be an informed public, democracy will suffer and the world will end).

These concerns can end up with governments effectively subsidising failing business models to preserve journalism as a sort of public palliative for disruptive change (as might occur in the UK if Lord Carter's Digital Britain report is ever acted upon).

But of course as the Internet changes the possibilities, journalism as we know it will simply be displaced (perhaps transformed) and will return in a new guise.

The problem is that while the awful creative destruction is taking place it's often not possible to see the process for what it is. Anyone who is interested in this issue might find this essay (it's more than a blog, less than a book) by Clay Shirky enlightening.

Shirky points out that when an institution or business model is under threat from the Internet, people understandably demand to know "but what will replace it?". This is often unanswerable because the destruction must typically happen before the replacement evolves.

But sometimes there's a hint. Sometimes you can catch sight of the new applicant.

Which is why Spiceworks is interesting. If you're in IT you might already know all about Spiceworks (http://www.spiceworks.com/). Nothing to do with girl-power, this is IT manager power. It's an online community site where IT professionals can exchange information, make contacts, find jobs... nothing unusual there.

But the key to Spiceworks is that it used a free IT management application as the draw and, because the give-away enabled it to get to scale quite quickly, it had the numbers to do the 'media' side of the business itself.