I can’t believe InfoWorld magazine is closing shop (“going online and focusing on events”). Editor in Chief Steve Fox has a good take on it over at Info World’s site. I am really going to miss it! That’s my main connection right now to the business tech world. I love several of the columns over there and am majorly bummed at the loss of the physical magazine.

InfoWorld’s been going for 29 years and though I’m all about the online world – I’m unlikely to read it anywhere near as often as I do when it gets mailed to me. I used to read InfoWorld on my breaks at the convenience store I worked at while I built up my tech business. I have a lot of happy memories of that – even if I couldn’t discuss the articles in InfoWorld with as many store customers as I could newspaper stories about things like the world’s ugliest dog (warning: very ugly dog).

Holding and reading magazines is something I do not want to give up. Granted, InfoWorld is the only free industry magazine I get that I regularly read. Some, like everything in KMWorld except David Weinberger, are so bad that I get mad when they show up in the mail.

I must admit, another question that comes up is this: is it a print media thing that’s going on here or is it that InfoWorld’s basic thrust of Enterprise 2.0/Service Oriented Architecture, etc. was fun for me to read but isn’t widely enough accepted in enterprise tech to support the magazine any more? Maybe it’s actually a bunch of crap that us web 2.0 heads like but doesn’t actually work as promised in the business world. I honestly don’t know. I hope that’s not the case but it would be irresponsible not to consider it.