In the U.S., we are just getting around to realizing that QR code can turn iPhones and whatever comes iNext into devices that tie together the physical world to the virtual world. I know I used to think QR Code was nothing more than a re-tread of the ridiculously conceived CueCat.

When I started using an iPhone, I started re-thinking the ways that print can be bridged into web content via QR Code. Then I started thinking about QR codes on clothes and all sorts of products. However, I must admit, it was not until I started looking into how the Japanese have, over the past decade, used QR Code, that I realized how someone there could be inspired to have the idea for the building above.

Quote:

(Using a mobile device app pointed at the building)…”Our proposed vision of the future is one where the facade of the building disappears, showing those inside who want to be seen. As you press on the characters their comments made on online appear in speech bubbles. You can also browse shop information, make reservations and download coupons. Rather than broadly tagging, we display information specific to the building in a manner in which the virtual (iPhone) serves to enhance the physical (N Building). Our goal is to provide an incentive to visit the space and a virtual connection to space without necessarily being present.

Welcome to the future.

(via: resourceshelf.com)

Why is the lightbulb the symbol for having an idea?

The obvious reason is that it symbolizes a light turning on in your brain at that “aha” moment.

I think the lightbulb is a great symbol for another reason. For how it was invented — and then the way it became what we know it is today.

First off, the inventor of the lightbulb is not who you think. At least 22 inventors before Thomas Edison “invented” a form of incandescent lamp. However, it was Edison who invented the entire channel necessary for the lightbulb to light up the world: from generating and distributing electricity, to creating uses for lighting, to, yes, the lightbulb or “lamp” part of the distribution channel that was like the version of it that Edison invented: long-lasting and capable of being manufactured in a way that made it economical to mass market.

The same is true today.

As I wrote recently, more than a decade of eBook readers came and went before the Kindle. The Kindle was, and still is, a fairly clunky bit of hardware. But like Edison & Co. with the lightbulb, Bezos & Co. invented an entirely new distribution and payment channel and system for the eBook. The same is true for Jobs &. Co. with the iPod/iTunes Store and the iPhone/iTunes/Apps system.

“The channel” is what matters. The gizmo is secondary.

These days, a company rarely gets to “own” a channel anymore. (And as consumer/users, we shouldn’t want them to). Apple and Amazon have pulled it off. Twitter has also. Facebook has, to a degree.

During 2010, you’ll see lots of companies who don’t have ownership of a channel try to exert power as if they did. They will put up pay walls around content and wonder why no one pays.

They will fail because they believe their content is a lightbulb that we, like moths, will be attracted to.

And they are correct, their content is a lightbulb. But they don’t own the channel anymore.

So they’re in the same boat as those 22 guys whose names no one can recall who invented the lightbulb before Edison.

A “Tablet” computer

First off, if you are a reporter and you want to write about the coming digital devices that are going to be whatever Apple is going to come out with next year, stop calling it a tablet. Here’s a Wikipedia article about tablet computers. What you’ll read there is a device that has only one thing in common with the mythological Apple device — it is rectangular. So listen up: When it comes to anything that’s like a computer, the word “tablet” means something completely different than what is about to hit the world. Apple (and, those who attempt to enter the fray after seeing the Apple device) won’t call it a tablet. I believe Apple will call it an iPad (a name I credit Chris Messina with using first.). And we will all be talking about pad media in six months as if it had been around for longer than, well, I haven’t heard it called “pad media” before, so, now. Tablet is a word that describes fully functional computers that geeks have loved, but the only people who use them are doctors, some industrial process people and actors playing FBI and CSI agents on TV.

An “iPad” device
(concept: Isamu Sanada)

A pad device won’t be a fully functional computer — like a notebook computer. But you’ll be able to run “apps” on it and surf the Internet. It will be like an iPod Touch, only with a bigger screen.

Okay, that’s out of the way. Let’s get on to what this re-rant is really about:

If you’ve read this blog for ten days or ten years, you know one thing: I don’t believe the best use of a new medium is to attempt replicating an old one. So I cringe just a bit when I read a story like the one in Wednesday’s NY Times about the way in which (as has been discussed on this blog many times) magazine publishers are getting ready for the magical appearance of the mythological Apple iPad “and other such devices.”

The article includes a key point that most of the publishers quoted seem to miss (as typical):

The new approaches depend on two assumptions: that consumers will finally embrace the tablet computers that manufacturers have promised for years, and that they will want to read magazine-style content on them. Publishers are creating magazine like products for these devices, but different mediums lend themselves to different reading styles, as the Web showed.

(Sidenote: Can someone remind me who those manufacturers are who have been promising tablet computers for years? Manufacturers have been manufacturing tablet computers for years. What they haven’t been manufacturing, they haven’t been promising. I follow this stuff pretty closely and I’ve heard pundits and bloggers and fan-boys and Michael Arrington promise the devices, but “manufacturers”? No. But back to the main point.)

So, first important thing to note: The devices that are going to be coming out are, I’m sorry to disappoint the publishers, not going to be marketed as “magazine reading devices.” And despite all of the “getting ready for the tablets” activity, people aren’t going to be running out to buy them so they can replicate the magazine reading experience. No more than they purchase computers or videogame platforms to replicate the magazine reading experience.

People replace old media with new — they don’t replicate old media with new. (Well, at first they do, but not in the long run.)

Even the Kindle, perhaps the only gadget I have that seems most to replicate a preceding medium (the book), is not a success for the “replication” reason. How do I know that? Well, about a month before the Kindle was announced, I purchased a book called Print is Dead and chapter 7 of that book, page 115 in the ironically printed version of the book, is the author’s ill-timed explanation of why the eBook was such a flop — to that point.

How “FAIL” was that? To come out with a book about the end of print — but feeling the need to write a chapter on why the eBook was a failure at precisely the point in time when it suddenly became a success.

But I’m glad the author wrote that chapter because it allows me to echo what the author was saying at the time: eBook readers have been around since the 90s — and they flopped.

So it was not the technology that made the Kindle a success. But if it wasn’t the technology, why did Amazon succeed where others had failed?

Amazon got two things right:

1. The Kindle Store

As a reading platform, the Kindle device was not really that much of an advancement over the decade of attempts that came before it. Where they succeeded was in the way the digital books were delivered. For all of Amazon’s lack of learning from Apple’s mastery of product design, Amazon learned one thing from watching Apple capture the digital media download market — at the correct price point, digital media will sell if you get the “store” part and “storage” part and the “playing” parts all working together — and drop-dead simple for non-technical people to understand and use.

So, like the iTunes Store and the iTunes desktop software and the iPod/iPhone, Amazon set up the Kindle store so that a user could seamlessly find, buy, organize and read a book all on the same device. They even out-did Apple: they made it where nothing about the Kindle had to be plugged into a computer to be used. I’ve had a Kindle for almost two years and I’ve never plugged it into my computer — never.

I’m still amazed with the ability I have to hear about a book on NPR and have it purchased and loaded into my Kindle within 60 seconds. That is what is revolutionary about the Kindle — the ability to turn book purchasing into an impulse market among people who don’t hang out at bookstores.

2. Pricing

Listen up publishing industry who is licking its chops about all the money they’ll be able to make from publishing magazines on the mythological Apple iPad that may or may not be appearing next year. The Kindle dropped the price of reading a newly published book by half — and more, in many cases. I can now read first novels or dense biographies for $10 instead of $25 and up.

In other words, it was “dropping the price of books” that made the Kindle a success.

Every article I’ve read about magazine publishers and new devices has focused on how the publishers believe they can increase the price of digital media by packaging it in a magazine format (perhaps spiced up with video) that is displayed on a rectangular thin hunk of plastic instead of on a computer screen.

No doubt, some people will line up to purchase some content — and some of that content will be packaged like a magazine, but the notion that integrating video into print and offering on a pad media device is going to suddenly convince people to whip out their squares, well, I’m sorry to be the barer of bad tidings.

Bottomline: I love magazines. And I will love creating magazine-like content for iPads. I will love creating e-magazines and ebooks and e-you-name-it. But reading a magazine is going to get only a tiny, tiny segment of the time I spend using an iPad. It’s a device that will connect me to the world — with everyone I know or have known or will know. I will be able to help run a business on it. I will be able to talk — probably video conference — with co-workers, clients, friends and family using it. I will be able to listen to every song ever recorded and watch every TV show and movie ever produced on it.

It will be a place where people live.

To think the iPad’s highest and best use will be reading content presented via a magazine-metaphor interface is, well, missing a rather big point.

By the end of the day, you may be reading or hearing about something that may be described as “the Hulu of Magazines” or the “iTunes Store of Magazines” or something like that. By the time the news, first reported by PaidContent.org, makes it into the general media, the reporter will be trying — and failing — to give you a metaphor that allows you to understand the meaning of a joint announcement today by News Corp, Time Warner Inc., Conde Nast and Hearst Corp that they are readying their print titles with agreed standards for a range of devices from ebooks to tablets.

But this is no Hulu or iTunes or Amazon.

First, the standards.

While the group of publishers told PaidContent.org the standards are “open,” I’m guessing by “open” they don’t mean the common definition of “open” used by the software and Creative Commons community, but “open” in the “we all agree to these standards” but “we control them and the DRM attached.”

Additionally, the companies will create a “digital newsstand” to deliver their titles and content to all types of new digital and mobile devices. (Thus the Hulu (which really doesn’t work, because it doesn’t charge for content — the metaphor actually refers to the joint-venture nature of the agreement) and iTunes Store comparison).

Of course, there are already massive digital newsstands. While you may know the iTunes Store for delivering video or audio files or “apps” — which are all-of-the-above, it has long been capable of delivering digital books and magazines. Amazon.com is in the digital newsstand business in a massive way. I could go on and on. Buying digital media is nothing new or earth-shattering. Buying digital magazines or books are nothing new. Buying digital-video, -audio or -books is nothing new.

So what is? One thing: The notion (hope) that “digital magazines” (which are, in essence, souped-up and “rich-media” enhanced PDFs) have enough perceived value by consumers to be worth “paying for.” And if we (Hammock will be in the digital content media creation for “pad” devices) are to succeed in this arena, publishers also have to convince the audience that the value of the content is roughly equivalent to the value of a paper magazine without the cost of paper and distribution (if the publishers try to keep those costs in the digital version, this is a non-starter: Kindle proved lots of price-point debates on that front).

So, in my opinion, publishers have a much more daunting challenge than merely agreeing upon standards and setting up a joint-venture digital newsstand.

They must evangelize an entirely new medium.

With the help of Apple and Amazon and the parade of companies who will be selling you little tablet-like display devices in the coming years, the new medium will likely succeed over time. As I indicated (and have been preparing for) I look forward to developing content for the new “pad” media.

But I doubt the folks sitting at the table today will get it right. They need mass audiences for their business models to work. For the next few years, we’re in the era of niche and quick-response guerilla media. In other words, not these guys’ forte.

A long, slogging, trench war fought in content niches will likely win this war.

But hey, I’ve been wrong before.

I have a theory that goes something like this: If the name of your organization is Interactive Advertising Bureau, any study of the needs of internet marketers is going to suggest that “advertising” is the solution. According to my theory, such a study will focus on how media companies should involve getting a salesforce of “category experts” and interactive marketing gurus who can help develop more “engaging options and formats.”

So, having this theory, I’m not in the least bit surprised that a new study from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and Bain & Company suggests the following:

*Online ad formats and creative have not evolved to meet marketers’ needs

*Media companies lack category expertise when they sell to brand marketers and engage with them too late in the media planning process

*Marketers want integrated campaigns instead of platform-specific media programs

*While marketers see high value in online advertising and believe that it could be effective at all stages of the purchase funnel, current industry practices inhibit greater investment of brand ad dollars

*Marketers express needs for differentiated services for their brands and believe that media companies and agencies have to meet those differentiated needs for online advertising to grow.

Nor am I surprised that the study recommends “media companies” need to take six steps, based on the needs expressed by marketers:

*Create segmented offerings to meet the separate needs of advertisers who are focused on building brands and those who are looking for direct response

*Make brand-focused marketers a priority by building a sales force of category experts who respond directly to those marketers’ specific needs

*Develop a full range of solutions with more engaging options and formats, including social networks, video and other rich media

*Offer deeper service and support customized to vertical industries, to help advertisers plan, create and measure the brand impact of online ads

*Optimize the ways that ad inventories are sold, with a range of approaches from full-service to self-service to partnership with ad networks and resellers

*Enhance organizational effectiveness by setting the right priorities, clarifying internal roles and accountability and investing in sales staff skills and incentives

Wow. I wonder how much the IAB paid Bain for that? Here’s the reality — free from me having to convince marketers that “advertising” is the solution — as “Rex” is my middle name, not “advertising”:

*If you’re a media company, chances are, you don’t think of yourself as a marketing services firm, so therefore the solutions you will develop will be programs to utilize the media properties you own. If you’re a media company, you have a certain DNA that prevents you from suggesting that even a portion of the clients’ “advertising” budget goes to the competition’s URLs, even if its in the best “branding” interest of the client. Perhaps Bain and the IAB can come up with a commission structure for selling the competitor’s URL’s inventory. Maybe there will be talk about such, but push-comes-to-shove, whose property are you going to suggest — the one that serves the marketers branding needs best, or the one that serves your shareholders and personal bank-account’s best? This reality is why the entire institution of “marketing agency” exists. As much as traditional media companies want to be in the marketing services business, the “brand” they market best is their own.

*That “the thing formerly known as advertising” doesn’t fit neatly into formats — or, at least, a set of formats that can ever be standardized

*That “marketers” who create awful advertising in all the current formats will create awful advertising in any new format.

*That coming up with recommendations like the IAB/Bain’s is akin to the Aesop fable about the National Mouse Association who commissioned Bain to do a survey of mice recently eaten by a cat. (Short version: Bain survey suggests putting a bell around the cat’s neck to serve as early warning signal that the cat’s around. In the parable, a mouse blogger then asks, “But who’s going to ‘bell the cat’”?)

With my own “bell the cat” suggestion, here is all that marketers need to do to succeed in using advertising or un-advertising, no matter what the format or who’s selling it:

*Create great products and services that a specific group of people believe are great.

*Talk constantly with those people

*Find where those people are talking with one-another, join in

*Find where those people are talking with people who haven’t yet discovered your product

*Spend your marketing budget supporting those places: Providing great sponsored content, hosting events, underwriting whatever you can, paying for free wifi at airports for those people. Make those people think you are everywhere, because you are everywhere they are. Oh, and buy lots of banner ads in those places, also.

*Wake up each morning and go to bed each night reminding yourself this: The passion for my product and service is bigger than any one URL

*Fill your own URL with great content that supports those people’s use of your product or service. Give them how-to support and finger-tip access to any question they could ever dream of having about your product or service. And did I mention that such content should be filled with words and terms that people use when searching for information about your product or service?

*Find ways to enable them to share knowledge about how to use your product or service better than you could ever tell them — you just make it, they’re the ones using it all day.

*And always remember, advertising is not just a format.

*Get a clue

(Cross-posted on the site of Hammock Inc., a content marketing and custom media company filled with people who understand un-advertising.)

When I started blogging almost ten years ago, I decided that I would not blog about the transactions of the magazine world: the buying, selling, launching, closing, hiring, firing stuff. Those things are what trade (business-to-business) publications and news websites focus on and I don’t really want to play the role of “reporter” here. (Self-appointed pundit is more fun.)

However, I have made some exceptions to that rule. If transactions involve friends or someone who is especially newsworthy, or if the launch or closure involves a publication that reporters start pulling out the adjective venerable to describe. (In journalism school, they must teach that there are no other adjectives to describe magazines that have lasted a long time.)

So I decided to point to an “insta-blog” in which Kevin Demara captures “the final days of the venerable magazine Gormet because it reminded me that while (as I’ve siad) magazines open and magazines close, magazines are also people.

(via: waxy.org)

The Wall Street Journal this morning reports (paywall protected) that the December issue of Esquire will include some “augmented reality” features that, when held up to a video camera, will trigger some video. While the phrase “augmented reality” is about to become one of those terms you’ll get sick of hearing because it will soon mean anything, so therefore nothing, the “idea” holds some promise unlike the incredibly awful blinking cover technology Esquire tried last year.

While I have not seen the issue of Esquire and don’t know exactly what they’ll be doing, last year a German automotive magazine and Mini Cooper joined up to create something that may give you a taste of what can happen when you link up new media and old in ways that create something completely new (unlike when you try to replicate old media with new media and you end up with something stupid). I’ve embedded a video below that demonstrates how it was done.

Warning: Early iterations of these approaches will be expensive, gimmicky, silly and only-for-nerds. But somewhere down the road, they will make sense and will be used to do things we haven’t even thought of yet. Stay tuned.

For a few people who are obsessed with the way content flows from creator to consumer (to use a food metaphor), today is a rather interesting day. It’s the day when a concept that started out being called an RSS news reader — and specifically, a concept called “River of News” — goes as mainstream as anything can go in contemporary culture — the concept became the default front page a user sees when logging onto Facebook. Today, however, few people will use the term RSS news reader to describe what’s taking place. And “River of News” will not be discussed — unless it’s by people who like to argue over such things.

Today, the “news” will be about how outraged some people are going be that Facebook has its second new re-design of the year. (I haven’t seen the “outrage” stories yet, I’m just guessing based on previous coverage of any time anyone changes anything.)

More on the re-design in a minute, but first let me say something that needs to be noted: What Vint Cerf is to the Internet or Tim Berners Lee is to the World Wide Web, Dave Winer is to content “feeds.” (And please, before you start telling me that feeds have been around since 19-whatever, I’ll agree that feeds have been around since cave drawings — I’m talking here about feeds that depend on a contemporary conceptualized approach that utilizes XML protocols and standards (i.e., RSS, but not just RSS), APIs and other means to power all sorts of content syndication.)

Let me be clear: Just as I wouldn’t say Vint Cerf or Tim Berners Lee are to be credited with (or blamed) for what people have done with news feeds and the River of News concept (i.e., the ways in which it has been bastardized or attempts to “commercialize” it), I wouldn’t say Dave Winer should be credited with (or blamed) for how “feeds” are used today.

What I’m saying is this: When I look at the redesign of Facebook, I see Dave’s influence all over it, from permalinks, attached media files, to the entire concept of having content from lots of different sources flow into one “reader.” (Again, please, don’t jump in with the “there were newsreaders before RSS came along — that’s another argument for another post.)

Anything good about the new Facebook news feed, I’ll credit Dave. Anything bad, I’ll blame others.

Okay, here’s some other thoughts on the re-design of Facebook:

The last “re-design” took place earlier this year and at the time, I wrote a post called, “Users are great for helping you tweak products, but don’t ask when you want break through ideas.” At the bottom of this post, I’ve am re-posting that in full, as it’s as applicable today as it was then.

First, however, I want to review a timeline for those reading this who don’t obsess over such things (which, I hope, is most of you):

1. The FaceBook redesign of March 22 was a direct rip-off of inspired by the service FriendFeed. (FriendFeed aggregates ones creations, comments, jestures or expressions from across all the social media he or she uses and streams it into one nice flow: See my FriendFeed page for an example, or look at the widget over in the righ-hand column to see the most recent “gestures” of mine it has picked up.)

2. On August 10, FaceBook acqhired FriendFeed and I wrote, “Facebook needs the people they’ve acqhired via the acquisition of FriendFeed. Whether they’ll actually listen is another story.”

3. On October 23, the new FriendFeed people stage a coup and take over the Newsfeed page (which is the default “front page” for users).

Users are great for helping you tweak products,
but don’t ask when you want break through ideas
(Originally posted on March 22.)

Robert Scoble has jumped into the debate over the new interface design of Facebook. Scoble’s piece expresses an insight I believe is too often missed by those who confuse the concept of “pleasing the user” with “creating breakthrough ideas.” In his post, Scoble does a tremendous job of describing why “like” is the breakthrough idea that is the foundation of the new Facebook design. Of course, the whole “like” idea is not Facebook’s idea (more on this later), but making “like” and “comment” central to the idea of what Facebook is is (to quote a former President).

Scoble (and I) are fans of Kathy Sierra, creator of O’Reilly’s Head First book series and a presenter extraordinaire. Over the years, in evangelizing what software developers need to do to create “passionate users,” she has addressed the need to create “breakthrough ideas” instead of merely better products. Last week in Austin, I was able to catch Kathy presenting to 1,500 of her fans and was reminded once more of how she can explain in a polite, yet explicit way, that focus groups and user research has its place, but that place is not in helping you design great software. It helps you tweak software, she says, but it’s no help when you want to create breakthrough ideas.

Another incredible discussion thread that is bouncing around the tech blogosphere this week about “research-driven design decisions” vs. “break through ideas” was started with this essay by Douglas Bowman, in which he announced his departure as the lead visual designer at Google. Design, of course, is merely one aspect of breakthrough ideas, however, the process of design at Google, as Bowman describes it (and as revealed in recent profiles of Marissa Mayer), seems obsessed with research into iterative changes (as in, what shade of blue gets more clicks) rather than creating something that changes everything. Bowman admits (who wouldn’t?) it’s hard to question anything Google does, as they have the users and money to prove they’re right and everyone else is wrong. However, as someone who uses Google products to the point of considering turning everything over to them (heck, even moving this blog to Blogger.com), I’m more impressed by their ability to make products solid and simple than with their ability to come up with anything new. (And, frankly, to me making web applications solid and simple is a breakthrough idea.)

I say all this to emphasize that I agree with Scoble: What Facebook is doing is not necessarily original, but it is building on a foundation they have that will help create the opportunity for breakthrough ideas. While most of the analysis I’ve read has compared the new Facebook design to Twitter, I believe that comparison is wrong. To me, it seems obvious the benchmark for “the new Facebook design” is FriendFeed. (As those who’ve made it this far likely know, FriendFeed was created by some Google alumni and is one of many services — but the most popular among the A-List geeks — that aggregates ones creations, comments, jestures or expressions from across all the social media he or she uses (i.e., sharing a photo via Flickr, favoring a video on YouTube, reviewing a restaurant on Yelp). If you’re reading this on my blog (vs. via an RSS reader or on Facebook), over on the right you can see a sidebar box (widget) that displays the headlines from my FriendFeed account, something I call jokingly, “The River of Rex.”

While the FriendFeed creators seemed purposeful in not trying to replicate or compete head-on with Facebook (Exhibit #1: The service has no user profile page), they obviously served as a proof of concepts that didn’t go unnoticed by Zuckerberg & Co. Concept #1: You don’t need lots of complicated “invite and display” applications to get users to aggregate every social media thing they do. Concept #2: Those “like” and “comment” fields make every tidbit of content a launchpad for conversation and insight.

Unlike past attempts by Facebook to change the service in ways that violated principles of trust or privacy, I believe the new design will actually be of great benefit to Facebook users — after they get over the whinning. So put me in the 5% group: I like the new Facebook design. I believe it serves the user (rather than screws them like the previous changes). In fact, I like it a lot.

However, I think soon the word “like” will be as confusing as the word “friend” is today.

I love the magazine format. I’ve admitted that on this blog quite a few times during the past decade.

However, I’ve also repeated many times that I am not a fan of the magazine business model — the mass media business model where a publisher depends on gathering a mass audience and selling ads to mass advertisers who’d like to reach that mass audience.

For me, the future of magazines is all about tightly focused, niche titles that serve groups of people who share a passion — a passion so deep that those who share it go seamlessly from web to mobile device to magazine to off-line meetups to learn and share as much as possible about that passion.

That’s why I believe the future of magazines is more likely to be found in today’s news that HP’s on-demand magazine service MagCloud will promote the service to the people who have created and manage the 50,000 wikis hosted by Wikia than in the news that Fortune Magazine is cutting back from 25 issues to 18 issues annually.

Wikis and on-demand, printed magazines? A marriage made in heaven, if you ask me.

But a mass market, general interest business magazine? Can’t see it in my crystal ball.

To me, the only business magazines with a future will be tightly focused business-to-business magazines that fit within an ecosystem of related products (online and off), services and events. Perhaps local or regional business magazines that do the same. But magazines intended for a broad business audience that depend on mass advertising as their primary business model?

The clock is ticking down, and it doesn’t stop at 18, 12, six or even four.

Related: That Strange Light you’re seeing is the future of magazines

Just in time for the National Peanut Festival, AP President Tom Curley is sounding nuttier and nuttier:

“Crowd-sourcing Web services such as Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook have become preferred customer destinations for breaking news, displacing Web sites of traditional news publishers,” (the president of AP) said. “We content creators must quickly and decisively act to take back control of our content.”*

Background:

•In July, I wrote a post called: “It’s official: The AP is absolutely nuts.”
*On September 30, I wrote a post called: “Why I use Wikipedia to follow major news events like the Samoa earthquake and tsunami.”

Bonus: From Jeff Jarvis: “They stood near Tiananmen Square –- as Alan Mairson tweeted, “Nice touch: They made announcement in Great Hall of the People, shrine to Central Control” –- arguing once again that people who aggregate, curate, link to, talk about their stories are stealing their value.

*Note: If he had said, “we need to offer an alternative to Wikipedia,” the meaning of his comment would have been different — and something I could agree with. For example, I’m a huge fan of Times Topics which is an alternative to Wikipedia. But that’s not what he said. He says Wikipedia has taken over control of the AP’s content and, in effect, has declared war on it. And that is nuts.

(Updated: See note added at bottom.)

This may surprise the people who confuse my championing the magazine format with some delusional form of cockeyed optimism: I fully expect all magazines to die. The first magazine in America lasted one issue, so the legacy of magazines dying is as old as magazines themselves. And unlike Dylan Stableford, I don’t think five gimmicks are going to save magazines. I don’t believe 50 gimmicks are going to save magazines.

But the death of one magazine title, is not the death of the magazine format. Nor is the death of five titles or 5,000.

If Dylan had labeled his post “5 ways to save nationally distributed magazines that depend on mass advertising and newsstand revenues to sustain a business model with outrageous overhead (do I need to go on: Geary-designed dining rooms, cars for all executives, legendary expense accounts”) I may agree with some of his points. But, frankly, I don’t think any of those things are going to help save those kind of magazines. And I say good riddance.

But he said “magazines.” And magazines don’t need saving.

I won’t rehash what I said in this interview recently with econsultancy.com or in this recent column I wrote for Publishing Executive magazine.

One major point I made in them is this: The mass-media magazine business model is what is broken, not the magazine format. For instance, magazine readership is up over the past eight years — which I think is pretty good for a dead medium. And technology has radically changed magazines over the past 20 years: it has enabled my company to compete on a level field with any magazine publisher in American in terms of design and production tools, access to collaborative tools and a myriad of other mundane things.

And, as I pointed out the other days, technology is changing the economics of the production and distribution of magazines.

But to reiterate a common theme of this blog: Magazines that try to be all things to a mass audience are dying.

But you can also say that about internet-based media that try to be all things to a mass audience.

Tight focus. Niche. Passion-focused community. Must-have information. Great design or usability. Those are the key to any media these days.

A business model that a medium supports (from contributions to dues to attendance fees) rather than a media business model (advertising and circulation) is the key to business success these days.

The problem with media is not about platforms, it’s about business models.

Gimmicks won’t save magazines (including “a Netflix for magazines” or a “Hulu for magazines“).

Creating a great magazine that feeds the passion or business-focus of a specific group of people is the only thing that will save magazines.

Update: Just when my friend Jeff Jarvis declares the end to magazines — or, at least an end to their value, P&G announces a magazine that, according to AdAge will reach 6, 7, or 11 million households — depending on whether your read the illustration cutline or the story. And, whatever it means, the magazine will use “mommy bloggers” to help build the database for the magazine’s distribution.

I’m not saying the quality of “rouge” magazine will be on par with the Conde Nast titles getting axed this week — it won’t be.

I’m just saying, the magazine format is not dead. Nor is its value.

Boston.com’s “Big Picture” collection of moving photography of flooding from the southeast makes me think there’s an instant magazine in there somewhere (see yesterday’s post).

Derek Powazek’s Strange Light
is a 40-page magazine that features
stunning photography from
the Great Australian Dust Storm of 2009.
The dust storm occurred two days ago.

“Strange light fell over Australia on 23 September 2009. An unexpected dust storm blanketed New South Wales and Queensland, turning everything an eerie shade of amber. At its peak, the storm swept up 140,000 tons of soil per hour. In spite of the worst dust storm in 70 years, intrepid photographers ventured outside to document what was happening to their homes, neighborhoods, and country. This is what they saw.”

Long time readers of this blog know that one of the recurring heros who appears here is Derek Powazek. This 2008 post links back to some of his accomplishments I’ve written about, including the rise and fall of JPG Magazine and his role in helping HP Labs create MagCloud, a platform that enables the creation and distribution of magazines that utilize on-demand printing.

Strange Light is a 40-page magazine that Derek just published (in this case, I mean “just” as in “sometime during the night, U.S. time”) using MagCloud.

So, to recap: The dust storm occurred on Wednesday. Photographers — professional and amateur — headed out into the storm and, with no organizing or pre-event planning, captured “a day in the life of a dust storm.” As people with digital tools in their hands are wont to do, photographers and observers began to upload what they were seeing and experiencing and capturing to the web. With the speed and finesse of someone who has an up-close-and-personal understanding of the “community” aspects of photo sharing (trust me on that one) and who helped to innovate much of the processes of web-based “social-media” collaborative magazine publishing, Derek put together a magazine — and has given us just one more glimpse into the potential of the magazine format.

I spend a lot of time pointing out that arguments over the future of magazines are rarely about the magazine format — they nearly always are about some business model related to circulation, advertising or cost-structure.

Derek continues to prove the magazine format — and print — can be a new media platform, if one gets their head out of (or into) the dust clouds.

Here are the keys to developing a successful media franchise.

1. Choose a topic about which people love to argue — the more passionately they like to argue over the topic, the better. Make sure there are two distinct camps in this topic — a clear “us” and a clear “them.”

2. Pick a side.

3. Become the go-to resource for every thing a person on that side (us) needs to win an argument with a person on the other side (them).

4. Make money by holding events where all the “us” people get to hear presentations from professional “them” bashers. Also, for quick cash, hold a day-long seminar called “How-to use Twitter to prove to the world we’re right and they’re wrong.”

Coming soon: “How to sell a successful media franchise.”