• YouTube Hunting for Magazine Partners| FolioMag.com
  Quote - Publishers control the ad inventory….Partners, he said, get “over 50 percent” of the ad revenue generated through YouTube.
  (tags: advertising magazines youtube video)
• Stock Photo Agencies | A Photo Editor (Rob Haggart)
  Rob has put together a list of links to stock photo agencies. Includes a break-out of agencies by their focus, as well.
  (tags: photography stock-agencies photostock stock+agency)
• Magazine companies on an e-media rollercoaster | FolioMag.com
  Quote - Major magazine publishers like Conde Nast and Time Inc. are forging ahead with e-media initiatives and online digital content distribution partnerships at a dizzying pace—even without the guarantee of ad dollars. Observation - I’m not quite following the ‘rollercoaster’ metaphor
  (tags: magazines digital-media)
• I hope Google Sites will help people “get” wikis | rexblog.com
  The new web app that launches tonight utilizes Jotspot, the wiki platform Google acquired in 2006. It has been reported previously that it will replace Google Page Creator.
  (tags: wikis wiki)

BusinessWeek’s Rob Hof is reporting that Google is launching a new “app” tonight called Google Sites. As I write this, it is not yet live, however, according to Rob, it uses the “Jotspot” wiki platform Google acquired in late 2006. Previously, it has been reported that Google Sites will replace another Google App called Google Page Creator which is currently be used by a grand total of 23 people — all employees of Google. (But don’t quote me on that.)

There are already several great free, easy-to-use, wiki-apps available, but I still find that most people I know in the real world (i.e., people who don’t read this blog), have no idea what a “wiki” is beyond the website Wikipedia. (Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that uses a wiki platform and approaches. But thinking that all wikis are encyclopedias is a bit like thinking all books are encyclopedias.)

Maybe repositioning Jotspot as “Google Sites” will help people get over their aversion, fear or misunderstanding of what wikis can be.

I’ve been “hosting” the wiki SmallBusiness.com for almost two years and my appreciation of the read/write approach, the communities they foster and the versatility of the platform grows continuously.

About six months ago, I finally realized (in a duh moment) how much working on a wiki reminded me of using Hypercard, the Mac program from 1980s that was my first hands-on involvement with “hypermedia.” The little program — and it was little — used the metaphor of a stack of blank cards on which you could write anything and connect words (link) them to text on other cards: hypertext. It was a very simple concept to understand and, more importantly, the only programming necessary was the ability to type and link. I credit using it as a way to organize notes on my Mac with why I found it so easy to grasp immediately what the web was about.

It didn’t surprise me later when I ran across some interviews in which the creator of the wiki concept, Ward Cunningham, said he conceived of it first as a web equivalent of Hypercard.

It will be interesting to see if Google can help a more general audience grasp what they can do when they break away from thinking a wiki is “Wikipedia” and realize it’s just an endless stack of blank pages that you can use to organize a bake sale — or create your own company’s encyclopedia. Or anything in-between.

Later: Allen Stern (CenterNeworks) says he “hopes people never get caught up on lingo - as long as it does what they need it to, who cares what it’s called.” While I agree that it’s more important for people to use it than know what it’s called, I think a tech platform can go mainstream quicker if those who provide alternative services that do the same thing can at least all agree what to call the platform category. I can remember when companies were launching blogging platforms right- and left, but calling them things like “spaces” and “web journals.” We have a category name for e-mail. We have a category name for spread-sheets. (I could go on, but you get my drift.) Why shouldn’t the same be true for the category of wiki creation applications.

Thursday morning: Google luanched sites overnight with this explanatory video. Allen will be happy. The word “wiki” is never mentioned:

• Esquire shows how a magazine should love letters | Designing Magazines
  Quote - Esquire certainly wouldn’t be the first magazine to “enhance” its letters page, but I’d like to believe that it’s possible to take the best of a magazine’s mailbag (and web forums) and turn it into something that would work this well in print.
  (tags: magazines design)
• Blaming the Post Office for magazines that fail | mediabistro.com
  Quote - In an era where even keeping a magazine with (a) huge base of readers is difficult to keep afloat, how is the cool little guy to survive? My Response - Publish a magazine people can’t live without.
  (tags: magazines)
• My review of the new Punch Brothers release | RexHammock.com
  Chris Thile’s new group released a new recording today. My guess is you’ll hate it — or be blown away. My review is on my RexHammock.com, my “tumblr” experiment.
  (tags: punchborthers, thile, christhile)

Warning: This post rambles on a bit about custom publishing before finally getting to the point of asking someone from the UK (Martin Stabe, are you out there?) to translate some English into American for me. But first, the rambling part.

In the U.S., the company I run is referred to as a “custom publishing” or “custom media” company.

In the UK, such a firm is called a “customer publishing” company or, sometimes, a “publishing agency.” So, I’ve grown to accept that in my small niche of the media world, in the UK and US, we often say different things that actually mean the same thing.

Customer publishing companies or custom media agencies are marketing services companies that provide a wide array of outsourced services and products for marketers and other communicators at companies or associations who want to create and manage on-going (recurring) media (magazines, online media [podcasts, video], email newsletters, wikis, etc.) that will help them develop closer, deeper and longer relationships with people known as customers or members (we typically call them readers or viewers or participants, as well).

In many ways, our firm operates like a custom media “agency” on behalf of our clients. And, more-and-more often, our clients are other media companies who want to outsource to us aspects of editorial or production processes.

I say all that because I’ve been instrumental over the years in trying to raise the visibility of the entire notion that companies like mine exist in the U.S. — independent media “agencies” or divisions of giant media companies — that are “custom publishers — or custom media” providers.

In the UK, the notion of “customer publishing” is more universally understood by publishers, marketers, journalists and readers. As I said, in the UK, they call it “customer publishing” a term that never caught on in the U.S., because, well, those of us who started the Custom Publishing Council didn’t want to limit our market universe to those who had only “customers” when a lot of our work was focused on publishing magazines for clients who have readers with names like: members, alumni, patients, employees, supporters, donors, passengers, etc. It’s sort of like back when a former head of the IRS wanted to start calling tax-payers “customers.” The designation just didn’t work.

Sorry for all that rambling on the way to getting to the following question:

Today, in The Guardian, there is an article about Dennis Publishing starting a customer publishing “arm” that includes this quote:

“Dennis Publishing is to launch a customer publishing arm under the creative watch of former Maxim editor Derek Harbinson to produce print and digital magazines for businesses in a bid to create new revenue streams. The new subsidiary, Dennis Communications, which will sit alongside the firm’s traditional consumer publishing division and focus on producing traditional print and digital customer magazines, which will offer bespoke video footage, moving imagery and editorial.

I followed that all the way to the part where it says “will offer bespoke video footage, moving imagery…”

As I know there are a few UK media-types who occasionally tune into my RSS feed, I’m wondering if any of you could translate that phrase “bespoke video footage and moving imagery” into American.

• Depressing magazine news | FolioMag.com
  I typically don’t point to the news about the launches or closures of magazines (lots of others track those), but this one is particularly sad: No Depression is shutting down.
  (tags: music magazines)
• Newsweek and Time should endorse presidential candidates | Jon Friedman, MarketWatch
  Quote - Time and Newsweek need to come up with compelling reasons for us to read them. I can think of one: Endorse a presidential candidate. My observation - It would compel at least half of us to read them.
  (tags: magazines)

From those funny folks at The Onion: “Tennessee Helpless Against New Basement Tornadoes“:

“Officials from the National Weather Service issued a severe weather alert for all basements in Tennessee Tuesday after a deadly new weather phenomenon ravaged scores of residential downstairs areas, leaving every other part of the houses completely untouched. The recently discovered targeted cyclones, known as basement tornadoes, tore through cellars all over the state, killing dozens and injuring hundreds.”

This explains a lot.

(Later: I agree with some Nashville readers who suggest this may not be funny in light of the killer storms that hit our area on Feb. 5. However, I also think if we can’t make fun of them, the tornadoes have won.)

If you want to be out in front of the next Chris Anderson book every marketing consultant — and worse, your boss — will be quoting in a few months, go ahead and read this Wired magazine article from the March issue that was posted this morning: Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business. Those of us who read Chris’s Long Tail blog have been following along the book’s (and article’s) development (at least mentions of it) for quite a while, but this article is the first step in its public roll-out. And it’s a clever one.

For example, if you are one of the first 10,000 who sign up, Wired will send you a copy of its March issue for free. And not as a part of a subscription offer (but you’ll be trading them you e-mail address for it). In one of those weird magazine things, however, it will probably be April before you receive the copy of the magazine, according to the fine print.

And then, there is the How to Make Money Around Free Content wiki entry on Wired’s How-to Wiki that features a Hugh MacLeod cartoon and a Fred Wilson headline quote (what, no Robert Scoble?)

The topic may seem a bit dated for those among us who are online community, marketing and media obsessed — those who, for example, check in with Seth Godin on an hourly basis. Seth has provided us (beautifully) for years with the parable version of the value of free phenomena. Seth is the Mother Goose of marketing gurus — he explains things in ways even a marketing director can grasp them. And on the other end of the spectrum, a few brilliant academics have explored in deep, scholarly ways, other avenues in the village of the Economics of Free: for example, anything written by Yochai Benkler.

However, I predict that Anderson’s article — and subsequent book — will get the topic out of the marketing department and academia into the hands of finance and executive types. I’m hoping the book will — like The Long Tail — get into the hands of people who can not only get it, but do something about it.

Quote:

“But free is not quite as simple — or as stupid — as it sounds. Just because products are free doesn’t mean that someone, somewhere, isn’t making huge gobs of money. Google is the prime example of this. The monetary benefits of craigslist are enormous as well, but they’re distributed among its tens of thousands of users rather than funneled straight to Craig Newmark Inc. To follow the money, you have to shift from a basic view of a market as a matching of two parties — buyers and sellers — to a broader sense of an ecosystem with many parties, only some of which exchange cash.”

No matter, you have several months before you have to read the book. (I’m sure there will be a free downloadable version.) And even a few more months after that before its title becomes a square on buzzword bingo cards. In the meantime, I suggest you read the free article and write down some notes on a 3X5 card.

I could have just added this link to my link blog, however, it needs just a little bit more of a shout-out. So, here’s a quote from a post titled Why All Consumer Magazines Should be Free Online by Felix Salmon in the Market Movers blog of CondeNast Portfolio.com:

“Publishing in full isn’t just about maximizing web traffic, either: it’s also about not pissing off your readers. When I read a great article in the Atlantic, I want to blog it; many other people in my position will at the very least want to be able to email it to their friends and colleagues. None of that is really possible unless and until it’s online. And since the internet thrives on the new, and hates the old, people want to link to you when the magazine comes out. No one wants to link to you weeks later, when it’s old news.

As “publishing in full” also means making ones archives available, I suggest this post be distributed around CondeNast, as well.

Posted on February 23, 2008

Over the years, I’ve heard lots of stories about couples meeting online. And I know that an online industry has grown up around helping people connect with others who are of the same mind — or heart — or both.

Yet when I started blogging, the last thing (but definitely the best thing) I ever expected to post one day was a photo of a happy couple who are getting married this weekend who first met because of this blog. I feel like Michael from The Office when I interject myself into this couple’s “how we met” story, but they’ve told me they first became aware of one-another through comments on this blog and the first time they actually met was at a blogger event I co-hosted with the guy on the left, a Nashville lawyer who was a legendary early “persona” blogger who went my the name Mr. Roboto. Yes, that’s Mr. Roboto.

Anyway, I’ll skip the rest of the story and merely say congratulations and best wishes and I hope the weather is swell in Hawaii where you are arriving and preparing for your wedding — however, I know that first, Mr. Roboto will be watching a little basketball game.

Congratulations, David and Lena.

Recently, I wrote about the lost art of campaign jingles. (Actually, the “jingle” is a lost art.) On this morning’s Weekend Edition, Scott Simon interviewed Jim Nayder of “The Annoying Music Show” about some really, really bad presidential campaign songs. Very funny stuff. The audio will be available at approximately 12 noon ET.

(Sidenote: Dear NPR & Chicago Public Radio powers-that-be, It sure would be great if The Annoying Music Show were available via podcast.)

(If you’re not an over-the-top magazine geek, you may want to go ahead a skip this post. I am such a geek, and this post proves it.)

In what is perhaps the most significant change in the print-production approach of a major magazine title since October, 1985*, Southern Living has changed from saddle stitch binding (the kind with staples) to perfect binding (squared-off along the spine) with its March issue arriving in homes today. My colleague (and long-time Southern Living subscriber — and food blogger) Laura Creekmore just wrote about receiving her March issue on the Custom Media Craft blog at Hammock.com.

Saddle stitching is expensive and technically challenging for a magazine like Southern Living that has 300 or so pages and is published in a vast array of local and regional editions. Perfect binding greatly reduces the mathematical challenges required to match up various versions of pages in the front and back of a magazine. I’ll skip going into the challenges more deeply, but if you do more reading on the topic, you’ll learn why the trade magazine of the magazine industry is called Folio.

Why did Time Inc. allow Southern Living to stick with saddle stitching for so long? (Other than the obvious reasons that SL is a cash-cow and many SL alumni are now executives at Time Inc. and they understand the nuanced down-side involved in such a decision.) I know there are some Southern Living alumni who read this blog occasionally, so I hope they weigh in with the real reasons, but here’s my semi-educated guess: Time Inc. has been afraid to anger the tens of thousands of readers who have vast collections of past issues of the magazine displayed on bookcases. Ironically, perfect bound magazines probably display better in such a collection (think National Geographic), but once you have a few decades of stapled magazines displayed (and if you grew up in the south, you’ve seen such), it may come as a shock when the March issue of the magazine shows up in the mailbox and it no longer lines up like the old issues.

Again, that’s a theory. Surely, the Southern Living folks went beyond the typical reader research to isolate collectors of the magazine to guage what their response will be. They did, surely? If not, this should be a very interesting experiment in what happens when one ignores the obvious.

Sunset magazine, another magazine owned by Time Inc., switched to perfect binding in the mid-1990s. Frankly, I don’t recall if there were controversies or protests from readers. Whatever the response, the magazine survived and the earth continued to spin.

Personally, I would have done it 20 years ago, but, then again, I actually liked the taste of New Coke.

*Magazine trivia buffs may recall that October, 1985, was the issue when Playboy switched from saddle-stitch to perfect binding. Additional fun fact: Madonna was on the cover of the last saddle-stitched issue of that magazine.

• Flickr No-Follows (Some) Outbound Links | Small Business SEM
  Shows how clueless I am — I assumed Flickr comment links always had no-follow tags. According to this post, the no-follow rule does not apply to links in ones profile.
  (tags: flickr seo)
• Macbook Air Craft | Flickr.com/photos/dexmerino
  A parody mock-up of what the MacBook Air would look like if it had all of the features people are complaining it lacks.
  (tags: macbookair humor parody)
• What’s next for open source and public media? | Doc Searls (Linux Journal)
  When Doc starts looking into his crystal ball, I take note. Like, literally. I take notes for the next time I’m asked to speak on that topic.
  (tags: docsearls opensource)
• How to build fast, high-capacity podcast sites on the cheap! | Sitening Blog
  My friend Jon Henshaw not only knows how to prepare a great how-to, he knows how to write very search-friendly subject lines.
  (tags: podcasting)
• Sorry, Boys, This Is Our Domain | New York Times
  Quote - Among the youngest Internet users, the primary creators of Web content (blogs, graphics, photographs, Web sites) … of the moment are digitally effusive teenage girls.
  (tags: internet bloggers research web+culture)
• Reed Elsevier to divest Reed Business Information | FolioMag.com
  And the wheels on the bus go round and round.
  (tags: b2b magazines business+media)

Cory Doctorow is reporting that Bertelsmann’s “Random House Audio has announced that it will now allow its audiobooks to be sold without DRM by all of its online retailers.” Already, it sells DRM-free audiobooks through emusic.com. From that experience, Random House Audio has learned that not treating its customers like criminals is a good thing. One would hope such a move by the largest book publisher in the world would lead other publishers to recognize (as I blogged in January) how ridiculous it is to encrypt downloaded versions of audiobooks while the same audiobooks on CDs are not encrypted (i.e., you can go to a public library with your laptop and load up DRM-free audiobooks for free, but you can’t buy the same thing online). As I said then, for the same reason Amazon.com doesn’t sell music downloads that have DRM, it should pressure publishers to allow it to sell DRM-free audiobooks on its new acquisition, Audible.com.

Oh, yeah, and then it should do the same with eBooks for the Kindle.

(I learned about this on Twitter from @marshallk.)

• NPR’s ATC does GTD | All Things Considered
  You may want to put this in your read and review file.
  (tags: gtd)

Photo by: Tracy Olson

This is not a political post.* It’s an observation of an ironic application of the term “public financing” as it is used in this article in the New York Times (my bold for emphasis):

Mr. Obama’s startling success (at raising funds from small contributions online has) now put him on the spot, tempting him to back away from indications he gave last year that he would agree to accept public financing in the general election if the Republican nominee did the same.”

Read the whole article. If you’re fascinated with online commerce or social media or web-based advocacy, it reports a phenomenal (a word that doesn’t come close to capturing its gravity, however) accomplishment: The Obama campaign collected $36 million in January “overwhelmingly by small online donations.” As in, contributions from “the public.”

Okay. Here comes the irony. I can’t think of a political point of view — right or left — that would disagree with the notion that the most perfect form of campaign financing is that whereby individual citizens make small donations to the candidate of their choice. The kind that the Internet enables. The kind that anyone with a phone who knows how to dial an 800 number can make. Even those on the left must surely agree that what Obama is doing beats a government-run “public” method. Those on the right must surely admit what Obama’s contributors are doing is an incredible display of patriotism and individualism. Isn’t this the kind of citizen-generated financing that both conservatives and liberals should applaud? No $1,000 a plate fundraisers. No fake survey direct mail. No Labor-Union or corporate fat-cat PACs. (Note: I’m sure the Obama campaign had its share of traditional fund-raising activities, but the recent explosion of funds came by from small contributions pouring in online.)

Again, this is not a political post.* It’s merely an observation that I believe we’re seeing what “public” financing probably should be — and it’s not exactly comforting for some on the right — or left.

*Whenever I start out a post saying, “this is not a political post,” it’s a surefire indication that it is.