publishers

AUSTIN, Texas--Why invent the wheel by yourself if you can turn instead to a group of peers and solve it together?

That was the premise of a gathering here of executives from most of the leading companies in what might be called the "people-powered" industry.

These are companies like CafePress, Moo, Etsy, and 8020 Publishing whose business is manufacturing physical products designed by customers. CafePress, for example, makes T-shirts, coffee mugs, hats, and many other products emblazoned with logos and designs uploaded by users. Moo makes business and greeting cards adorned with users' own photos and images, and 8020 publishes photo and travel magazines full of readers' work.

But each of these outfits has until now had to solve a set of problems unique to this nascent industry--legal issues, community management processes, and even questions of nomenclature.

So as many of the people behind these companies prepared to go to Austin for this year's South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival, Moo CEO Richard Moross decided that maybe this would be a good time and place to get everyone together and discuss whether a cooperative investigation and search for solutions to common problems would be a good thing for everyone involved.

After all, there's strength in numbers, right?

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Federated Media Publishing, which sells advertising for a network of online publishers, plans to raise between $20 million and $30 million in a second round of financing, according to a source familiar with the deal.

The funding would add to earlier investments in FM of an estimated $4.5 million from JPMorgan Partners, The New York Times, and the Omidyar Network, among others.

Last month, FM hired investment bank GCA Savvian Advisors to handle investment queries, according to a report from PaidContent. According to TechCrunch, FM turned down a $100 million buyout offer from one interested party last month.

John … Read more

What do you do with 2,000,000 downloads and a 100% growth rate? With 240,000 members of your community and 900-plus developers (a number that doubled in 2007)?

You'd start Acquia, that's what you'd do. Or, at least, that's what North Bridge Venture Partners did, and the company looks to have a huge opportunity before it. I spent some time with Jeff Whatcott, vice president of Marketing at Acquia, to get more detail on the company and its launch of its products.

First off, however, I just had to know:

Does Acquia compete with Microsoft Sharepoint?

This is bigger than Sharepoint. Sharepoint is primarily behind-the-firewall collaboration. Drupal can be used for this, but Drupal's real sweet spot today is outside-the-firewall social publishing, or collaboration. … Read more

If you're an office worker in the unfortunate position of having a lackluster printer that's incapable of printing booklets, or have a general hatred of Acrobat's built-in booklet making resources check out BookletCreator.

It's a free service that takes any PDF you can throw at it and reorders the pages and layout to be printable as a multipage booklet. For the sake of your clients, it's even nice enough to send you back a copy that can be printed locally on other nonbooklet printing devices, free of any watermarks or other changes to the original … Read more

Hot on the heels of my writeup of PDFMeNot yesterday, reader Bonexaw tipped us off about PDFescape, another Web based Adobe Acrobat replacement. This time around, PDFescape pulls double duty not only as a free PDF reader, but also as an editing tool and Web host for PDF files.

PDFescape lets users fill out forms--one of the most commonly used features (besides reading). Additionally, the authoring tools let users create their own forms and send them out to others to fill out and send back. The best part is that the entire system is set up to avoid recipients having … Read more

Those grainy videos and photos you take with your mobile phone have a simple way to get off of your device and onto your blog, eBay, YouTube, or elsewhere.

CellSpin is a mobile application with a fairly simple interface to directly publish your content to the Web. Once a video is taken, a window appears with options to publish to Blogger, Facebook, Flickr, LiveJournal, YouTube, eBay, and several other blogging tools. After the content is posted, you see a brief ad, and then the application's home page pops back up.

The same process can be done with photos, notes, … Read more

Triggit is a new publisher's helper going into private beta today. It makes it extremely easy to embed pictures from Flickr, videos from YouTube, affiliate sales links from Amazon, and several other types of links. Except for one thing: You don't actually embed the links in the page itself, and you don't have to make any changes to your publishing system to use it.

Instead, the Triggit system works through a tiny snippet of JavaScript that you insert in your blog or site's main template. On the authoring side, once you log in to your Triggit account, you get a simple menu on your live site that lets you select a content type from the Triggit menu as well as corresponding text or an on-page location. Again, this is from your live site, not your CMS or blogging tool. Triggit then pops the link or media file into your page, and if necessary flows text around it.

How is this possible? Because Triggit doesn't actually modify content on your server. The JavaScript you have in your template makes a call to the Triggit servers, which then flows your content or modifies your HTML in real-time to display what you want to your users. It's like Greasemonkey in a lot of ways, except for your entire audience, not just you.

It's a weird, weird tool, and I don't know if I'd be comfortable using it on a major site, for three reasons: First, since the content is served outside of a publishing system, it's not searchable by the site's engine (and I'm not sure if Google would pick it up, either). Second, if Triggit goes down, your links and media content would go with it. See the CoverItLive fiasco to learn more about that. Third, who wants to have to use two publishing tools to create one site?

But Triggit has some things going for it. It is incredibly easy to use. It is much faster and more enjoyable to create affiliate links or to embed Flickr pictures in a post using Triggit than any native blogging software or other authoring plug-in I've seen. Second, it's a very interesting platform for future publishing tools. Since Triggit can publish (or more accurately, appear to publish) content to any platform or CMS, a content widget provider, like Amazon, eBay, or NewsGator, need only need create one tool for authors, and it will work on all sites that use Triggit.

I would not bet on Triggit taking the world by storm, since it's a very unusual product and there's a chicken-and-egg problem with it. It's not all that compelling without a large library of widget partners, and there's no reason to write a Triggit widget until it gets a lot of users. But it does represent an interesting movement in the ongoing widgetization of content. It illustrates how easy it can be for publishers to assemble their sites from pieces and parts from all over the Net. The major blog platforms already have native support for widgets, of course, but this puts that kind of power at the item level, and using an incredibly simple visual interface.

Triggit authoring currently works in Firefox only. We have 300 invitations to the private beta being held for Webware users, and video demo from Triggit, after the jump.

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Ever had a PDF file or two laying around that needed some minor tweaks, but you didn't wanna fork over the cash for a full version of Adobe Acrobat, or install some other PDF application such a rare task? Give PDF Hammer a look. The service lets you do simple page re-arrangement on PDFs of all sizes, and when you're finished it'll spit it out as one big, beautiful file. The service is pretty simple to use, and lets you upload multiple files without losing any rearranging or deleting progress you might have made. You can also … Read more

Glogster is a new publishing tool that's been making the rounds over the last week. The service is focused on letting people create "posters" of various bits of premade and user-generated content using a Flash editor. Unlike some blogging platforms, Glogster has no inclination to go after people who want to write something every day. Instead, the site is geared toward the tween crowd, or anyone else who enjoys partaking in glitter graphics, or those strange greeting cards with dogs and cats that have been Photoshopped to have enormous eyeballs. That being said, using the right tools, … Read more