It's always fun to put a stake in the ground before a product is announced and then see how close you came.

And next week we've been promised two products -- at least -- Google's Drive and Nick Denton's new publishing system.

Here are the interesting questions about Google Drive.

With Denton -- here's what I hope he did.

Draw a Venn Diagram with two circles on it. On one circle write "articles" and on the other write "comments". The size of each and how much they overlap tells you everything you need to know about an online publication. If one were to manage to make them completely overlap, so that there's no difference between the publication and the comments, then imho you've reached nirvana.

If I had a billion dollars (or some virtually infinite amount) I'd buy one of the big names of the news publishing world and transform it into a publication written by everyone. The staff decides what's on the home page. But even that doesn't stand up very long. Every user has the ability to create their own home page, and they compete against the "official" one.

In a true dotcom fashion, we'll figure out how to make money later. Maybe it doesn't even cost very much to run.

Anyway, Nick doesn't need a billion dollars to buy a big publishing brand, even though he has that kind of money, or access to it, because he already has a number of big brands that he can transform.

The question is can he get great stuff to flow through is world without paying for it? Maybe. He's always been a smart guy when it comes to software, and is willing to try idea out. So I'm looking forward to seeing what he comes up with, this week.

 4/22/2012; 12:20:50 PM.