Content Wise

See You at a Summer Publishing Conference

$1,500 Discount to Stanford Course
We'll be teaching again this July at the the Stanford Professional Publishing Course, an intensive and inspiring program for mid-career pros--and we'd love for you to join us. If you'll send us an e-mail to let us know that you're interested, we'll enter you in our random drawing for a $1,500 discount on the tuition.

Online Strategies for Magazines: Toronto Conference
On June 3 we'll present a workshop at the Mags University Conference in Toronto entitled, "Transcend Print! What Magazines Should Do Online." We'll also be speaking on "editorial marketing" for print publications and on how to write and edit for the Web. For descriptions of the talks, please see the seminar schedule.

Web Site Tune-up: Educational Publishers Summit in DC
If you can't catch us in Stanford or Toronto, we hope to see you at our "Web Site Tune-up" at the Association of Educational Publishers Summit on June 4 in Washington, D.C. We'll cover best practices in Web publishing and we'll conduct mini critiques of selected participants' sites.

Video Explains "Automated Content Creation"

A few weeks ago we wrote about Philip Parker's computer-assisted creation of 200,000 different books in highly esoteric niches. We just came across his video explanation of the process, which he calls "automated content creation." See below.

Podcasting Explained, in Plain English

Need to explain podcasting to your mother? Or maybe just get a better grip on the concept yourself? Check out this entertaining little video.

It's from our favorite demystify-ers of Web technologies, the folks at Common Craft. Lee and Sachi LeFever, we thank you.

Nine Steps to a Successful Web Redesign

With tax returns and spring cleaning behind us (we wish), many of us in Web publishing are girding ourselves for another recurring and daunting chore that can be put off no longer: the redesign.

If you're feeling that inevitability, we'd like to share nine pieces of advice that should help you plan a bang-up new site with relatively little bloodshed. This is not about tapping into creative inspiration. We're talking tactics to navigate around the political minefields and processes to reign in the runaway horses that inevitably present themselves during a redesign.

Here are the nine steps in brief. You'll find detailed advice in a more in-depth resource article we recently posted on our company site.

1. Read the tea leaves—analytics, user surveys, marketing research, etc.—to understand what's working and what's not.
2. Set preliminary goals based on your early research and analysis.
3. Get "the big buy-in" by convening a group discussion with stakeholders
4. Spin off a SWAT team, a small agile group, to do the long hard work of fleshing out plans for what will change and how.
5. Write it down & mock it up: We recommend a detailed redesign blueprint document to help you try on the new ideas and communicate them to graphic designers, programmers, and other "builders."
6. Check in with the stakeholders; get feedback on the blueprint and refine it.
7. Test out major elements of the redesign with users before launching.
8. Revise & repeat steps 5 through 8 as needed.
9. Explain & "sell" the benefits of the new site to your users as you launch.

Computer-Generated Books, First in a Long Line of "Pub Apps"

Here's an intriguing (bizarre? scary?) new twist in publishing: books created by computer algorithm.

Entrepreneur and management science professor Philip M. Parker has "automatically" generated more than 200,000 books with the help of 60 or so computers and a half dozen programmers. Most cover arcane, under served topics such as the market outlook for small bath mats in China. And Parker is selling them through Amazon's print-on-demand book service, BookSurge.

Parker's titles sell only dozens or in some cases hundreds of copies. But as today's New York Times report suggests, that could be a viable business model:

"His company, the Icon Group International, is the long tail of the bell curve come to life — generating significant total sales by adding up tens of thousands of what might be called worst sellers."

We hereby declare a new category of coverage in this blog—"Pub Apps"—to track such digital techniques, widgets, and applications. Somewhere in the never-ending stream of these innovative curiosities are sure to be ideas that will help shape the future of publishing.

Observer's Politicker.com: An Online Extension Into 50 States

Here's an ambitious online extension of a print operation: Observer Media Group, parent company of the New York Observer, has embarked on a plan to cover local politics through a network of Web sites in all 50 states.

Politicker.com ("inside politics for political insiders") now has 10 sites up and running--PolitickerNJ.com, PolitickerME.com, etc.--and will be adding more soon.

As Politicker's management told the New York Times, each state "bureau" will be a typically lean Web operation relying primarily on one or two reporters:

"[Managing Editor James] Pindell will hire young journalists, send them to state capitals with little more than a laptop and a BlackBerry, and let them build each state site.

"What the young reporters lack in experience, they make up for in passion about politics..."

Each Politicker site describes itself as "a virtual watercooler for the state’s political elite...a necessary daily stop for politically minded web surfers."

Will a big enough audience--and advertising market--gather around this watercooler? It will be interesting to watch.

Glimpses of the Future of Publishing

Four stories surfaced in the last week or so that suggest some answers to that nagging question in our industry: What is the Future of Publishing?

Squint, and you might see the vague outlines of what magazines and books may turn into in this increasingly multi-platform world.

1. The Industry Standard is back—with an online betting pool.

The magazine that chronicled the Internet explosion and then fizzled along with it in 2001 has been reborn, not in print but on the Web only. Its centerpiece is a prediction market, using ersatz "Standard Dollars," that aims to tap the wisdom of the Standard's crowd of expert readers and commentators.

If the market becomes a reliable trend-spotter for the tech industry, this could be a killer app. True, that's a big "if." Whatever happens, we think it's a creative attempt at an online extension for a brand that many believed had petered out. (Check out PPX, another magazine-related prediction market, at Popular Science's site; it covers "the future of science and technology." Simon & Schuster set up its own market, Media Predict, to spot ideas for books, recordings, and other media products that are likely to succeed; we wrote about it last year.)

More details on the Industry Standard's market and comments from Derek Butcher, vice president and general manager, are at Tech Crunch and the New York Times.

2. Here comes a unified, multi-platform book delivery system.

Writing about Amazon's plans to purchase Audible, Brad Stone at Bits thinks this is a real possibility:

"How about a service that allows you to seamlessly switch from reading a book on your digital device to listening to the same book read aloud as you get in the car, or if your eyes are tired, or if you simply want to hear a crucial scene acted out? And then switch back to the printed page?"

3. Cell phones are reading magazines.

Wired, Billboard, and Car and Driver have all recently published bar codes within the pages of their magazines in an effort to kick start their "mobile initiatives." Why? It's much easier to get cell phone users to tune in to related material if they don't have to manually type in those pesky Web addresses. Car and Driver's efforts are among the most ambitious so far, as Joanna Pettas reports at FolioMag.com:

"Car and Driver published more than 400 barcodes in its annual Buyer’s Guide in late December. Each car in the guide had a corresponding barcode linking to a microsite with pictures, reviews and a link to the full road test..."

4. And now, a platform to publish physical objects.

Three-dimensional printers—something in the neighborhood of Star Trek's transporter or replicator—have been used for a while now by aerospace and race car engineers, doctors, and artists. So reports materials scientist Mark Miodownik in the Independent.

As the technology continues to grow more sophisticated, it's not hard to envision the emergence of companies that enable their customers to "print out" a whole variety of physical objects: call them 3-D publishers. All right, maybe you have to squint a little harder to see it. But that's what they told Gutenberg, isn't it?

Consumer Reports Thrives Online

Consumer Reports, one of our designated Transcendent 10 publishers, just got some nice ink in the New York Times business section. CR has extended its brand into  a compelling online resource, complete with interactive product selectors and entertaining, ad-debunking videos.

According to the Times's article:

...it has three million paying subscribers online--up about 60 percent in the last 18 months--which experts say may be the largest number in the industry.

Tagging & Social Bookmarking Explained

Tagging and social bookmarking are handy tools that enable users to re-organize the Web for their personal use. They also provide an effective way for publishers to tap into the Web's viral marketing power.

But for people who don't already do social bookmarking and don't know about services such as del.icio.us, tagging can be a tough concept to grasp. Here's a simple, straightforward explanation in the form of a low-tech video from the folks at Common Craft Productions.

Common Craft also has great quick-and-dirty videos that demystify RSS feeds, blogging, and other key elements of Web publishing.

From Web to Print: User-Generated Magazines

While most of us are focused on moving print publications to the Web, two Web sites are working in the opposite direction.

JPG, a photo site, and Everywhere, which covers travel, gather user-generated material in order to create slick glossy magazines in print.

Both sites are owned by 8020 Publishing, which is backed by Halsey Minor, founder of CNET. Not only is 8020’s production process going contrary to most, it expects to make its money primarily from subscription revenue and to “limit advertising.”

The publisher’s trend-bucking model, described fully in last week’s New York Times, is an experiment worth watching.