publishing

Demand Media, the publishing company that achieved both impressive revenues and industry notoriety for its business model of fast, cheap content, is planning to go public.

The company filed an S1 form with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Friday. The SEC filing reveals that Demand's revenues in 2009 were $114 million, with losses of $22 million. Demand hasn't yet specified a value for the IPO or the index on which it plans to trade.

The Santa Monica, Calif.-based Demand popularized the model that has become known as a "content farm" or &… Read more

We resize images all the time--to e-mail to friends, post on blogs, share on Facebook, and much more. Although we often resize images in a photo-editing program as soon as we take them off the camera, it's not uncommon for us to need a resizing tool that can be used the rest of the time. After all, who wants to launch a big photo-editing program for tasks that can be completed with a lightweight utility? That's where Fast Image Resizer comes in. This basic program lets users resize images as quickly and easily as anything we've seen.… Read more

The second-quarter earnings that Amazon.com announced Thursday weren't quite up to par with what Wall Street had been hoping. But Wall Street had been hoping for good things, and the results were still pretty decent. One of the areas of growth worth highlighting the most for Amazon was all things Kindle--the e-reader device, and the huge marketplace of digital books available for it as well as for apps on third-party devices like Apple's iPhone and iPad and the Android mobile operating system.

In the earnings announcement Thursday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos characterized the Kindle system as an … Read more

Walk through the produce aisles of any grocery store and on the outsides of avocados, pomegranates, mushrooms, and just about everything else you'll see an astonishing number of stickers and labels advertising various kinds of quality standards: certified organic, fair-trade, all-natural, locally grown, and so forth.

Might we soon be seeing the same kinds of labels on digital content?

A small trade group called the Internet Content Syndication Council (ICSC) has been circulating a document since late May--highlighted Tuesday in an AdWeek article--to drum up industry concern about "content mills," a fast-growing sector of the … Read more

It's odd that the need to create newsletters, fliers, brochures, and the like hasn't gone away, but desktop publishing software has. A decade ago,  you had your pick of at least a dozen programs, but now the field is nearly empty.

Sure, you can still buy heavyweight applications such as Adobe PageMaker and QuarkXPress, but they cost a small fortune--$499 and $799, respectively--and they're overkill for most people.

That's why I'm a longtime fan of Serif PagePlus, a terrific desktop-publishing application that's ideal for designing both print and Web-based documents.

The applications … Read more

A management shake-up, tepid traffic, and a hyped product revamp that still hasn't seen the light of day: Much has been made, lately, of the woes facing onetime social-news darling Digg.

But even if things turn around after the release of Digg's "Version 4," which will go live later this year following an alpha test that's starting to make the rounds, its launch will give Digg an additional challenge. It's built up an elaborate network of influence and deal making between media companies and "power users" over the years, and the Version … Read more

A group of music publishers on Wednesday filed a copyright complaint in federal court against LimeWire's parent company and founder Mark Gorton, according to documents obtained by CNET.

Eight members of the National Music Publishers' Association, including the publishing arms of the four largest recording companies, were named as plaintiffs in the suit. They accuse Lime Group, parent of software maker Lime Wire, and Gorton with "copyright infringement on a massive scale."

The suit comes as LimeWire, the nation's largest file-sharing service, is trying to convince U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood not to shut down the service. … Read more

Microsoft Office 2010 is now available for purchase. We wrote our review for the Office 2010 Professional RTM version, which is identical to the final public release, when Microsoft released it to businesses on May 18. If you didn't get a chance to check out the beta version or an  earlier release of Office 2010, you can now download a 30-day trial version to see which version best fits your needs.

Microsoft Office 2010 Home and Student ($149.99) includes Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, and Microsoft OneNote.

Microsoft Office 2010 Home and Business ($279.99) includes … Read more

Let it be known that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wanted a book to be written about the company he founded. At the top of the acknowledgments for journalist David Kirkpatrick's new book about Facebook, "The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World," Kirkpatrick makes it clear. "Had (Zuckerberg) not encouraged me to write this book and cooperated as I did so, it would likely not have happened."

"The Facebook Effect," which will be available for purchase Tuesday, is the most extensive work written about the ubiquitous social-networking … Read more