I was impressed by the new SindoPower website, powerguru.org, which was launched just before PCIM. The high quality of the site definitely puts it into the same league as commercial publishers. As with any distributor site, however, it will inevitably suffer from a focus on a small number of manufacturers: distributors are not going to spend much time promoting lines they don’t sell.
It will be interesting to see if SindoPower can maintain the momentum of the site, and whether they can broaden it to address the world outside of their franchises.
With some publishers moving towards custom publishing as a source of revenue, it could be that the future of the electronics media will be many smaller sites, all of which have their own agendas and are far from independent. I hope this won’t be the case, and that readers will continue to value content from publications that aren’t set up purely to promote specific products and suppliers.