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I received a debut magazine on messaging today, here is my opinion


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Today in the snail mail, I received the first issue of Messaging News, August 2004 edition.  Online they let you download the PDF of this version, which confusingly is dated July 2004 unlike the print one.  But I digress and move on to thoughts.

It was not a large issue, 30 pages plus cover.  Content accounted for 19 of those pages.  But here is the catch.  Of those 19 pages, about 12 or so definitely were like vendor ads.  Not reviews of the vendor product, but like winded ads.

Of special interest to all of us was an article on page 20 titled The Future of Instant Messaging is Safe, Secured, and Self Managed by Melisa Labancz-Bleasdale.  However, it was not about the future, it was about a product from Valadian Corporation called Secure Instant Messenger (SIM).  How it does secure IM, provides high level security, logging, etc etc.  They focus on the fact that SIM uses a removable USB device for mobile workers for higher security by logging to the USB removing all traces from the pc.  Who ever heard of logging on the server instead?  Oh yeah, that Sametime product and a bunch of others do.  Why would I need for NASD compliance to log to a USB device that can be lost or stolen, removing the IM log.  Sounds like a way to get into more trouble to me.  "Hey Bill, I need your USB to verify you didn't share some information.  Oops, I lost it John."

Knowing this is a new magazine with some room to grow, I think they need to define what is a vendor article (Ironport has a big one in there) and what is editorial more.  Let the user know it might read like a giant ad, or that there was actual research done and in the writers opinion this was the best product. I will take that approach also as a writer myself.  But not here is THE solution and by the way, it is only about them.