During New York's inaugural "Social Media Week" festivities earlier this month, media-industry research firm Abrams Research (that's "Abrams" as in MSNBC's Dan Abrams, for the news junkies out there) conducted a survey about the perception of various social-media services within the industry. The results weren't too surprising: 30 percent of respondents would pay for Facebook (keep in mind that these respondents are people already active in the social-media world). They encourage businesses to think seriously about Twitter for marketing. Etc.
That's all good and fine. But what we really found hilarious was the extra-credit question, which asked respondents to pair up one suffering print-media brand with a social-networking service for the ultimate media mashup. (Or, as the survey called it, a "shotgun wedding.") The best suggestion would receive a $500 charity donation in the winner's name.
The winner, according to the research firm's release, was MIT business school student Amanda Peyton, who put up a relatively straightforward pairing of Reader's Digest and social-news site Digg.
"Take Reader's Digest, add Digg, get AARP to sponsor," Peyton's suggestion read. "Create Digg-type ranking system within RD website. Call it 'Seniors Speak: Content Ranked By Seniors, For Seniors.' Baby Boomers are getting older and 50+ community is tech-savvy and loves targeted products. Digg gets an entirely new demographic. Site can start with only RD content and then expand."
One of the runners-up, Samantha Duenas, devised a way to bring fashion tome Vogue into the digital age while bringing a whiff of exclusivity to the News Corp.-owned MySpace. "(Old Media) is going broke, MySpace is falling off a steep cliff into uncool. Vogue should make all of their world issues digitally accessible through MySpace for an annual subscription fee," Duenas wrote. "Models, photographers, stylists would have MySpace profiles with exclusive photos and media only accessible to subscribers. Usage of photos/media on blogs would tag back to MySpace."
That's interesting. Some of the non-winners, however, were just plain funny.
"High Times magazine and Twitter," one respondent said. "It will give a whole new dimension to the term 'tweetup.'"
"AARP magazine with Facebook," another suggested, "since all of our moms are on Facebook now anyway."
There were also some blatantly obvious ones: "Hustler and AdultFriendFinder. Talk about a match made in heaven." Along similar lines, "Playboy and Facebook. Just because I'd love to see a 'Poke a Playmate!' promotion." Abrams Research said it also received a suggested match of the New York Times and naughty video hub YouPorn, but that no explanation was provided. Figures.
Another one of the entries was an elaborate epic poem about magazine giant Conde Nast, penned by blogger Katie Baker. It didn't win, but her valiant rhyming efforts were recognized.
On Tuesday Google announced a partnership with several publishers to bring complete catalogs of old magazines online.
By using the same scanning process that has been implemented for Google's Book Search product, these titles undergo optical character recognition and are indexed into Google's search engine. In a post on the company's official blog, Google said that the scanned works will first be available in Book Search, with integration into regular Google search results to follow.
Among the more notable publications are Popular Science, Men's Health, Ebony, and New York Magazine. As part of the partnership, magazine publishers are getting links leading users back to the publication's site. These show up on the side of the content, along with advertising and user reviews.
Google has not provided a full directory of scanned titles outside of using a magazine tag, which denotes titles that are not books. However, once you've discovered a title there's a really neat way to browse through its history by decade, which includes a Google Maps layer that shows you places mentioned with links right to that page or article.
Google now offers full copies of old magazines. The selection is limited, but it will hopefully grow to encompass many titles.
(Credit: CNET Networks)It's not clear if Google or select publishers intend to further monetize this new program by selling full digital copies of certain titles. As it stands now, users are able to view entire copies of magazines, although they're not able to archive them for personal use offline.
Looks like we were right: PaidContent reported Thursday that restaurant and take-out menu listing site MenuPages has been acquired. The buyer, they say, is New York magazine.
No financial details were provided.
We reported back in May that MenuPages had been acquired, but didn't have any hints as to a buyer. We speculated that it was possibly Yelp or IAC's Citysearch. With New York as a buyer, it's likely that MenuPages will stay locally rooted rather than continuing to expand nationally: there are editions for Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, the Miami region, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., but the buyer is wholly Gotham-centric. There's no word as to what will happen to the non-New York editions of the site.
New York magazine, which runs an extensive network of local blogs, is owned by private equity firm Wasserstein & Co., and restaurant listings are a prominent feature on its Web site.
A site that's slipped through the cracks of our coverage is Time Inc.'s upcoming service Maghound. It's best described as a cross between a beer-of-the-month club and Netflix.
For a relatively low monthly fee, you'll be able to pick out certain magazines you want to receive, and they'll show up on your doorstep for you to read and dispose of. If you like something, you can simply keep receiving it, while replacing less-liked titles with new ones at a much lower price than it would cost to go out and buy them at the newsstand. Each plan can also be scaled up to higher tiers, meaning that you can continue to expand on your read publications while experimenting with new titles.
According to Folio Maghound is opening up for business in September, also known as back-to-school time for high-school and college students. The site's reportedly been in development for four years, all the while the company's been tweaking the distribution and billing system.
It sounds like it's been worth the wait, if only for privacy. The service will act as a proxy for your billing information, meaning that even if you're subscribed to 30 magazines, only one company is going to have your information--Maghound. This could theoretically keep it from being sold to other companies, something nearly all publications have done to bring in an extra stream of revenue.
The company also has an inside track to your tastes and the tastes of others. It has the potential to build in a recommendation engine like what Netflix has to tell you magazines you would like or not like, based on what you've thought of your past orders.
Of course, the results won't be nearly as deep as Netflix, which currently has a library of more than 100,000 titles and a veritable arms race between teams of statisticians and software engineers to build better algorithms. Maghound is starting out with just less than 300 magazines (published by companies ranging from Time Inc. itself to rival Conde Nast) from which to choose. There will be "premium" titles, which cost a buck or two per month, something not found on Netflix.
I'm eager to give the service a look when it launches. I think there's a real potential to grab folks who want to save some money but not commit to certain titles. There's also a nice possibility for publications that tend to have better seasonal content, such as cooking and video game magazines, to get a few more subscribers at critical times.
Idio, a cool service that takes your musical tastes and serves up blog articles about musicians it thinks you might like, has added a handy feature for people who want to actually listen to the artists they're reading about. Its new built-in music player creates a track list of artists based on what you're reading about. Prior to this player, the service had little embedded clips you could click to listen to, but the newer iteration is a full player with playlist and button navigation.
When I first looked at Idio, I proclaimed it "Rolling Stone 2.0" and I stand by that. Print publications can't touch this kind of integration; that is unless they've got a pack-in CD and cues to skip to various tracks like a museum tour. In the recent months since my first look, the number of sources has increased, as well as the number of articles that now sits at over 6,000 a month. I hope that this will solve one of my main complaints, which was the recycling of articles from issue to issue. The service is also building a network of independent journalists who contribute to future magazines.
Reading about artists in Idio can now be accompanied by music related to what you're reading about. Neat.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Botanicalls has figured out a way to get plants to Twitter when they need to be watered.
(Credit: Botanicalls)If you thought it was bad enough that all your friends, and even your mother, want you to keep up with them via their Twitter pages, your plants could now do the same.
That's because the folks at Botanicalls, a group that formed at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program that figured out how to get plants to make phone calls when they need to be watered, have now extended that functionality to Twitter.
"Botanicalls Twitter answers the question: What's up with your plant? It offers a connection to your leafy pal via online Twitter status updates that reach you anywhere in the world," says the Botanicalls site. "When your plant needs water, it will post to let you know, and send its thanks when you show it love."
And if you want to know how to make your plants Twitter their thirst, then hop on over to the Make magazine blog, where Geek Gestalt's good friend, Phillip Torrone, has the how-to information for you.
Now, don't get me wrong. I absolutely love the idea that you can get a plant to Twitter. But, at the same time, I'm a little worried about where this might lead. After all, my cat gets hungry several times a minute. I simply won't be able to handle if he gets ahold of a Twitter account.
Who says magazines are dead? Not Fortune Small Business Magazine, Hearst Magazines, or Red Herring. And certainly not Olive Software, the Santa Clara, Calif., company responsible for creating the interactive digital twins of their print issues.
Fortune Small Business e-zine for November 2007
Like the best discoveries, I stepped into Olive Software's work by accident, while flipping through the digital leaves of Fortune Small Business Magazine. As a champion of downloadable and Web apps for consumers, I wouldn't normally seek out this kind of story, but the experience was too gratifying not to share. After all, would I hold back from you?
Click once and the magazine blooms in its self-contained online reader. Click again, this time on the right arrow, and the cover unfurls to reveal a faithful representation of the magazine's glossy, full-page interior, down to the shadowed hollow where the pages meet the binding. Flip through to read articles horizontally across multiple pages, each one adhering to the original layout, rather than dive-bombing into a vertical scroll that makes do with the Web's predilection for linear storytelling.... Read More
Idio is an online music magazine that launched late last year. Idio looks and feels like a paper magazine, with turning pages and some pretty slick-looking layouts. What's neat is that Idio isn't just made up of text and photos, there are also music and video clips embedded right into the pages. Users get content fed to them by an algorithm that selects articles or clips (it thinks) you might be interested in based on your favorite bands. Content comes from all over, either from blogs or music news feeds.
To drill down into your musical tastes a little further, you can go into each genre and pick out which styles you like. Each subgenre is given a tag, and you can click on it to change how much impact it has on your feeds. Idio will then sort through the content to tailor it to your new choices.
Idio has built in some social democracy functionality to the interface. You can dig deeper into an article, either by giving it a thumbs up or down (as with StumbleUpon) or by using a simple slider with a heart to show how much relevance it has to your musical tastes. You can also comment on a story, although you're likely to get a richer commenting experience by visiting the blog or the site where the story originated.
Idio is very pretty, but I found it recycled some of the same content after using it for a few days. I can't recommend it for breaking music news and long, in-depth content, because you're not going to get it. What's more interesting is the platform and design, which reminds me of the HyperComics viewer I looked at in January. It's a fun throwback to the visceral feel of reading a magazine, which admittedly feels a little awkward in a Web browser but is still full of possibilities for rich media viewing, given the right content.
The layout of an Idio magazine is two pages at a time. To flip to the next page, either click on the page icons at the bottom of the screen, or click on the corner of a page you're looking at.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
If I hear about one more highly focused social networking site, I'm going to explode. Or failing that, write a blog post. Every day, Webware gets pitched on at least one, and sometimes several, new social nets designed for particular demographics: Barack Obama supporters, lesbians, you name it. The new metasocial network service Ning is leveraging this trend by making it possible for anyone to start a network, just as easily as anyone can now launch their own blog.
People with traditional publishing backgrounds are looking at this trend and thinking that social networks could become the new special-interest media properties. itLinkz, for example, is attempting to build a network of social networking sites based around communities that could use better representation online, and that have existing advertisers looking for their audiences.
The new face of special-interesting magazines?
(Credit: CNET Networks)This is the same logic that led the rise of special-interest magazines like Car and Driver, Running, and Popular Electronics in the 1950s.
In the case of itLinkz, the first site is NurseLinkup. It's aiming for an audience right in the company's sweet spot: Large, but not too large, and with a network of advertisers who'd love to reach them. And unlike Ning, itLinkz is not handing the keys to its networks over to the community entirely. The company has hired writers and editors to fill out its sites with content for the audience. It's like About.com plus social networking.
itLinkz is also putting effort into marketing its sites. It's not just going to throw them to the wild and hope for the best.
Next up from itLinkz: GolferLinkup. After that, COO Mike Ragan wouldn't tell me, but he was proud to say that the company has registered thousands of "linkup" domains.
The CEO of FindNearby (recently covered) has similar aspirations, and like itLinkz, his company has advisers from old-school publishing.
Will magazine publishers eventually become social network operators, or at least partner with the companies gunning for their readers? It makes some sense. And it would be good to see some business thinking applied to this movement, instead of the current reliance on Google advertising to support all these new networks.
- prev
- 1
- next
