It may have been one of those memorable New Yorker cartoons that in the first frame showed a professor speaking before a bored class.

In the second frame, the professor replaced himself with a tape recorder that delivered his oration from the lectern.

In the third, students had replaced themselves with their recorders, leaving only a machine talking to other machines.

There is something about this sequence that is aroused when I read about writers endeavoring to create a web presence, or to construct a writer's platform. Why are scribes substituting a technology for genuine communication of the type that they have charged themselves with the task of creating?

In other words, as I have asked elsewhere, "Shouldn't You Be Writing?" instead of twittering or chatting about a zillion things that are ancillary to this vocation?

Isn't the best "web presence" or "writer's platform" you can create, the manuscript, itself, in one form or another?

For example, I write articles that pertain to my book publishing and audiovisual recording interests. The list includes negotiation, sales, customer service, communication, law, sports, and martial arts. Upon producing 80 to 100 articles in a field, I then have the equivalent of a 50,000-word book and/or a six-to-eight disk CD program.

Plus, those articles make quite useful segments for the speeches and seminars I deliver.

Indeed, this piece you are reading now will somehow find its way into multiple formats from which I will derive web traffic, distinctiveness, competitive advantage, and compensation. When publishers search my name they'll see approximately one million "hits," individual web sites that carry my articles, sell my books and speeches, consulting and electronic presentations.

This article is an article and it is marketing and it is a product with futurity.

It will generate "heat" by being discussed and seen, widely.

I hope it will create light as well, demonstrating that having a winning web presence and writer's platform and actually composing your deliverables, can and should be accomplished, simultaneously.