Technology companies are launching big advertising campaigns as they wager on a pickup in business spending and jockey to have their products stand apart in an environment where new customers are hard to find and competition is intensifying.

Companies such as Google Inc. (GOOG) have recently embarked on major ad pushes. This month, Google rolled out globally an ad campaign to flag its Gmail service and Google Docs word processing and spreadsheets. It’s an unusual move for the Internet giant, which has done little traditional advertising.

On Thursday, Juniper Networks Inc. (JNPR), a maker of networking gear, is starting its first-ever global campaign to raise awareness of its brand. Its bigger rival Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) last week launched new radio, print and online campaigns promoting a line of products for small businesses and a new system for corporate computer rooms.

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On Monday, the Kindle 2 will become the first e-reader available globally. The only other events as important to the history of the book are the birth of print and the shift from the scroll to bound pages. The e-reader, now widely available, will likely change our thinking and our being as profoundly as the two previous pre-digital manifestations of text. The question is how. And the answer can be found in the history of earlier book forms.

Most literate people are familiar with at least some of the consequences of the print revolution of the 15th century, but far fewer are as aware of the much more profound change that occurred when rolls were replaced by codices–pages bound between covers–in the late Roman period.

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One of the proverbial axioms of the “publishing world” is that sex sells. Pornography, in particular, is a massively popular business. Indeed, where porn goes, so goes technology. At least this is the oft-repeated claim.

So what does it mean for the universe of print publishing when porn mags are having problems? It means the traditional walls between online and offline publishing need to come down in the stables of many a publishing house, that’s what.

Case in point: Playboy (PLA) announced Thursday that it would be fully merging its online and print-side operations. The best known of all the skin magazines is reorganizing into a business with focus on leveraging all of its content across three mediums (print, online, mobile).

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Virtually all the predictions about the death of old media have assumed a comfortingly long time frame for the end of print–the moment when, amid a panoply of flashing lights, press conferences, and elegiac reminiscences, the newspaper presses stop rolling and news goes entirely digital. Most of these scenarios assume a gradual crossing-over, almost like the migration of dunes, as behaviors change, paradigms shift, and the digital future heaves fully into view. The thinking goes that the existing brands–The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal–will be the ones making that transition, challenged but still dominant as sources of original reporting.

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If you’re a tree, you’re probably feeling pretty good right now. We’ve long known that the traditional newspaper–a hard-copy compendium of the previous day’s events, printed on an obscene amount of wood byproduct–was terminally ill. But two of 2008’s big media developments–the Christian Science Monitor’s plan to kill its daily print edition outright, and the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press’s decision to radically scale back their print operations and refocus online–suggests that the traditional newspaper’s death will come sooner than anyone imagined.

But the term “newspaper” has another meaning, too: it’s an organization staffed with men and women who report and analyze the news for the public. Newspapers in this sense aren’t about to go extinct. They are being reinvented, however.

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I’ve got a few questions for American magazine publishers:

Are you in or are you out?

Do you still believe in the very act, the very business, of publishing?

And do you still believe in presenting carefully selected words and pictures–expertly produced information–for a targeted audience?

Lately, some companies seem to be answering yes–for instance, Ziff-Davis, which announced last week that it is discontinuing its PC Magazine as a print product but has been investing in its Internet strategy and is therefore ready and able to continue publishing the title on the Web.

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The January 2009 issue of PC Magazine will mark a monumental transition for the publication. It is the last printed edition of this venerable publication. Of course, as with any technology-related enterprise, this is not the end, but the beginning of something exciting and new. Starting in February 2009, PC Magazine will become a 100-percent digital publication.

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If you think we are going to get out of this mess in a hurry, think again.

UBS analyst Matthieu Coppet today cut his expectations for advertising spending for this year, next year and 2010. He now sees overall spend up 3.7 percent this year, down 3.9 percent next year, and then up three percent in 2010. His old forecast: up 4.1 percent, then down 0.7 percent, then up 4.8 percent.

Particularly sobering is his forecast for the U.S., where he sees an 8.7 percent drop in spending next year, including an 11 percent decline in “traditional media”–print, broadcast and outdoor. That would be the worst year for those categories in 60 years.

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The Christian Science Monitor plans major changes in April 2009 that are expected to make it the first newspaper with a national audience to shift from a daily print format to an online publication that is updated continuously each day. The changes at the Monitor will include enhancing the content on CSMonitor.com, starting weekly print and daily e-mail editions, and discontinuing the current daily print format.

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It’s funny how things change. Five years ago I wouldn’t have given second thought to producing print material with digital printing. No, only offset printing. The thought of a brochure, annual report or catalog printed as if it had come out of Kinko’s–excuse me, FedEx Office–was just unbearable, and even the much-hyped and pushed feature of individual customization–Dear Jon, from Chicago, IL 60660–didn’t seem to be much draw.

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Oh joy, another high-profile prognosticator predicting the demise of the American newspaper–and this time the soothsayer is no less than the chief executive of Microsoft. “There will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network,” Steve Ballmer told the Washington Post. “There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.”

… Well, if Steve Ballmer can so cavalierly predict the end of an industry, so can we. By 2018, there will be no more Microsoft.

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I’m a noise junkie. I used to be a news junkie, but I’ve hung out with the world’s top journalists enough now to see that the good ones are noise junkies. They are the types that head into a crowded party and listen to pitch after pitch (noise) and drunken story after drunken story (noise) to find something that their audiences will find interesting (news). I’m not the only one who likes the noise: Hutch Carpenter defends the noise too.

Last year I got a tour of the Wall Street Journal’s West Coast printing plant. They print 60,000 copies an hour. At the end of the tour the head pressman said “I’ve been reading this six hours before you did for more than 15 years now and it hasn’t helped yet.” Why? Cause the news isn’t where the action is: the high value bits are stuck in the noise.

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Three centuries after the appearance of Franklin’s Courant, it no longer requires a dystopic imagination to wonder who will have the dubious distinction of publishing America’s last genuine newspaper. Few believe that newspapers in their current printed form will survive. Newspaper companies are losing advertisers, readers, market value, and, in some cases, their sense of mission at a pace that would have been barely imaginable just four years ago. Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times, said recently in a speech in London, “At places where editors and publishers gather, the mood these days is funereal. Editors ask one another, ‘How are you?,’ in that sober tone one employs with friends who have just emerged from rehab or a messy divorce.” Keller’s speech appeared on the Web site of its sponsor, the Guardian, under the headline “NOT DEAD YET.” Perhaps not, but trends in circulation and advertising––the rise of the Internet, which has made the daily newspaper look slow and unresponsive; the advent of Craig’s List, which is wiping out classified advertising––have created a palpable sense of doom.

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In 1991, Stewart Alsop, the editor of InfoWorld and a thoughtful observer of industry trends, predicted that the last mainframe computer would be unplugged by 1996. Last month, IBM introduced the latest version of its mainframe, the aged yet remarkably resilient warhorse of computing. The mainframe stands as a telling case in the larger story of survivor technologies and markets. The demise of the old technology is confidently predicted, and indeed it may lose ground to the insurgent, as mainframes did to the personal computer. But the old technology or business often finds a sustainable, profitable life. Television, for example, was supposed to kill radio, and movies, for that matter. Cars, trucks and planes spelled the death of railways. A current death-knell forecast is that the Web will kill print media.

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1. Get out of the newspaper business. Culturally, you can’t look and define your business as the delivery mechanism. The business is truly content and distribution across all pipes. The asset is journalists and the brand. A print-based property is just one of the many ways to distribute the digital bits. Most newspapers have in charge of their leadership “newspaper men.” They should turn over the reins to young execs, women and people with diverse backgrounds, who are Web-based and consumer savvy and will NOT be wed and enamored with the print-based delivery system of the past.

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