Say Everything Again

Amazing publications small and large are still shutting down or shrinking their business. (The Bold Italic was a particularly surprising, sad one)

From the aforementioned piece by Felix Salmon:

On the other hand, if you’re more career-oriented, and want a good chance at a well-paid middle-class lifestyle down the road, I don’t really know what to tell you. Except that the chances of getting there, if you enter the journalism profession today, have probably never been lower.
With a message like this, it’s hard imagine the industry won’t lose at least a few bright recruits to Hollywood or the tech industry.

It's something in between a publisher and a platform.

If the platisher model is a stable formula — that is, if it can scale to massive audience numbers and motivate marketers to pay a premium for presence — what’s to stop the pure platform players like Facebook, Twitter and Google from embracing it? YouTube has already gone the furthest, fostering subject-based “networks.” Facebook’s latest creation, Paper, employs editors to curate and organize content. And on Wednesday, Dick Costolo told Wall Street, “We want to do a better job organizing content for our users along topical lines rather than just chronological lines.”

Media people, like me, tell ourselves that pure platforms won’t be interested in doing what we do, or that they won’t be good at it, and perhaps that’s true. But it’s also true that enterprising organizations adapt to opportunities. Traditions and biases can be overcome. The rise of the platishers is evidence of just that.

Three years ago, Jane Pratt celebrated the launch of her new site XoJane with Say Media by throwing a party at the Jane Hotel, a boutique hotel in the West Village. Pratt was regal in a bright yellow Marc Jacobs dress, and stars Michael Stipe, Courtney Love and Mike D stopped by to fête her return to journalism. Marquee brands Cover Girl and Lord & Taylor were on board for the launch. For Say, a tech startup that raised over $100 million and decided to meld tech chops with original content, Pratt embodied a new strategy whereby it would couple “passion-based media” with branded content.

It didn’t quite work out the way they had envisioned. Today, Say is reverting back to its technology roots: XoJane and the rest of its owned sites, including tech property ReadWrite and decorating go-to Remodelista, are up for sale. CEO Matt Sanchez said trying to be both a media and technology company ultimately proved too hard. Ultimately, even during a time when every media company wants to dress itself up as a tech outfit too, the differences between the businesses were too great to bridge.

Make eBooks. Really simple. Right from your Google Drive. liber.io integrates into your Drive and creates beautiful ePubs.

Liberio is a new platform (launching today out of private beta) for simple eBook creation and publishing straight from Google Drive.

journi is the easiest way to record your trips offline and on the go. It even lets you keep your friends in the loop without extra effort.

Build beautiful programming books and exercises using GitHub/Git and Markdown.

Over the past few years, new properties such as Tumblr and Posterous, among others, emerged to further simplify the ease of creating and sharing content, though at the same time, users could have also just used the “Notes” product within Facebook, or posted directly on Quora or on their Google+ pages, or simply used Twitter as a microblogging platform. With these asymmetric “follower” model networks (including Facebook now, with the “subscribe” feature), users have to potential to tap, build, and maintain larger audiences, to know more about their audiences tastes and preferences. Readers also don’t have to rely on finding content that’s optimized for SEO through backlinking, but rather through social discovery filters and interest-matching algorithms.

Today in 2012, the publishing category is once again, all of a sudden, crazy competitive. Branch has implemented a subtle and clever twist on Quora’s formula for content generation and quality controls by employing an “invite-to-thread” model for each “branch” (many of which are prompted by questions), as well as allowing users to create new “branches” by forking discussions when users want to take a topic elsewhere.

Longreads is a company dedicated to helping readers find and share the best long-form stories on the web. Longreads started as a Twitter service and hashtag in April 2009; Longreads.com launched October 2010.

Even Walk says that he sees these new platforms as “content farms for good,” meaning they are mostly focused on curation of quality content, which is why I think it’s better to think of them as curation engines rather than farms — or perhaps as “artisanal” content producers, to use a popular term. Both Svbtle and Medium are clearly putting a lot of emphasis on selecting quality contributors, since both are invitation-only, and LinkedIn seems to take this approach as well (Quora is much more open, in part because it converted its existing message boards).

LinkedIn clearly has an interest in driving traffic to its site with its Influencer content, in the hope that readers of those articles might decide to stick around or visit more often, and make use of the other things that actually produce revenue for the company. But in that sense, its program is more like what some call “content marketing,” which uses content that isn’t directly monetized as a way of promoting a brand or an advertiser’s main business.

In the end, all these platforms seem to be designed to appeal to writers who may have thoughts to contribute, but don’t necessarily want to maintain their own blog. Making that easy, and curating the results so that they are of high quality, may ultimately be a way around Google’s content-farm algorithms, but in the end it doesn’t really matter if higher-quality content is what gets produced. In that sense at least, Google’s efforts seem to be working.

Founded in 2010, Thought Catalog is a digital magazine owned and operated by The Thought & Expression LLC, an experimental media group based in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Thought Catalog introduces long reads and digital books for your tablet, eReader or mobile device. All titles are available through Amazon, Apple and Barnes & Noble. New titles are released biweekly.

Thought Catalog is now accepting manuscripts for digital books. The minimum word count is 5,000 words. Manuscripts should be attached as a Word document or Rich Text File. Include with the submission a brief bio and an overview of your work. Send your work to manuscripts@thoughtcatalog.com.

Publisher, Chris Lavergne: chris@thoughtcatalog.com.
Advertising & media kit requests: biz@thoughtcatalog.com.

This may not be the case for the future of Twitter. While I’ll keep my own site and blog, earlier this year Twitter purchased a small Y Combinator company called Posterous, which from its beginnings was akin to Tumblr, built with a high sense of design, speed, and utility. Ultimately, they lost the traffic and war for network effects to Tumblr and WordPress, but their infrastructure and flow still carry value. I can imagine a Twitter world where “Extended Tweets” exist for writers, reporters, and casual content creators to upload text, images, video, and other content inline within the Twitter experience (like Jason Alexander did). Twitter has also demonstrated a tendency to behave this way, as exhibited by the creation of their own photo-hosting partnership with Photobucket and more recent issues with Instagram “find a friend” API limits.

The Posterous technology and interface could provide Twitter with a powerful inline offering for more Tumblr-like content-creation to occur right within their own walled gardens, much like Facebook’s fan pages offer brands today. Expect them to offer free hosting, like Tumblr, and also allow users to “import” their data/media to house it all within Twitter.

A mlkshk user profile.

PandaWhale has built an discussion and sharing community around technology and other topics, where users can also post original content and then take their work and conversations to whichever platform they seek.

9GAG lets you create your fun collection effortlessly. It's the best place where fun creators and bored people meet. Unlike ordinary fun sites which are full of disturbing ads, 9GAG aims at spreading happiness to the world in an elegant way.

Medium — a newest publishing platform with a fast, clean interface and can, at times, resemble the Pinterest layout, too.

Curtis has a plan for this project that ties in the minimalistic admin and public interfaces of the platform with his larger goals as a writer, and possibly as an entrepreneur.

He’s creating an exclusive blog network.

He’s using his clout in design and startup circles to attract other thought leaders who blog, including Dom Leca of the beloved email client Sparrow, and John Collison of payment startup Stripe.

The idea is that the design of the blogging platform should be a vital part of the creative process, that helps some of the best minds in the business refine and present their thoughts. The interface includes a section for brainstorming ideas, and an easy flow for turning them into posts. It removes the array of options, like advanced markup features that you’ll see on WordPress and other established platforms, to focus writers on core ideas.

@anildash and every one of them based on the same premise: trade your content for their distribution.

Between LinkedIn, Quora, Medium and others, there have been more blogging tools launched in the past few months than the prior 5 years.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) is a Geneva-based non-profit organization best known for its Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, the Annual Meeting of New Champions in China (Summer Davos) and the Summit on the Global Agenda in Dubai. It also releases research reports such as the Competitiveness Reports and Risk Reports and engages with its members in sector-specific initiatives.

The Global Agenda Council on Social Media is in a different position than other Councils, because the topic of social media spreads across several different subjects. Social media can be applied to business, politics, industries, regions and issues. The group is thus truly a multistakeholder Council. With this in mind, the Council on Social Media intends to act as a public resource for all who are interested in the theme and will build upon the “need to know” points about social media that were developed last year.

In particular, the long-term focus of the Council is to make all of its output available to the public. Formats under consideration include podcasts, videos, blog posts and white papers. Key dissemination platforms will naturally include the social media, including Twitter; the Council has set up the hashtag #WEFSocialFuture for this purpose.

Some of the key dimensions the Council will address are:

1. curation
2. acceleration
3. the social and political implications of social media
4. privacy

Thank you for all the continued support

Draft has been on quite a roll, now serving up over a quarter of a million documents, and winning some really nice praise (for example a 5 star review at Macworld).

I can’t do this without all the support you’ve given. It means a lot to me. I hope you know that. And I hope you are having an awesome New Year!

Please stay tuned, I’ve got some really fun things coming up :) I’m always here if you need anything.

Draft, a streamlined online word processor with version control, is getting deeper into the new professional publishing ecosystem.

The one-man team of Nathan Kontny has just introduced a new REST API that’ll let any news outfit or other publishing organization connect Draft to the other software it uses. If you’re BuzzFeed or The Huffington Post* or another media company with a big mix of full- and part-time writers, you could use the API to let writers and editors work through versions together in Draft then publish straight to your custom content management system.

Meanwhile, if you’re running a group blog using a standard setup from WordPress or Blogger and you want a more pristine, versioned environment, Draft now lets you publish from it to them.

Nathan Kontny joins the show to talk about his lifelong entrepreneurial efforts, including launching two early Y Combinator companies, Inkling, and Cityposh; working as a software engineer on President Obama’s re-election campaign; and Draft, his fantastic collaborative writing platform. Find Nate on Twitter.

Safari Online, started in part by O’Reilly Press, has been the online tech library of record for years, with an extensive catalog of books from O’Reilly, Wiley, Peachpit, and more for your online reading pleasure with a subscription. And now, they’ve reinvented themselves with the new Safari Flow. More than an online eBook library, it’s an attempt to make longform books relevant to the Twitter generation of professionals.

A never-ending set of recommendations tailored for you, from the best training videos, books, and conferences in the topics you care about.

Mastering Rails application deployment
This book will show you from start to finish how to:
Setup a VPS from Scratch
Setup additional servers in minutes
Use Capistrano to deploy reliably
Automate boring maintenance tasks
If you've got applications …

A journey through a heartland on the slow road to ruin.

5. Each book can be read in a single session. Just an hour or so. I see this as a terrific fit for our over-busy lives. One reason reading has been in decline is that it's just too daunting to start a traditional 80,000-word book knowing it will take hours and hours to complete. You could argue that traditional books are the length they are in part because people once had fewer competing claims on their leisure time, and in part because the physical nature of a printed product means that books have to be a couple hundred pages long to feel like value for money.
But today the question to ask of a non-fiction book is: what is the right length to explain this idea? There are many 80,000 word nonfiction books that communicate most of their value in a couple of chapters, the rest padded out because -- well, gee -- books just have to be a certain length. We're excited to offer books that are mostly in the 15,000 - 20,000 word range. And just as an 18-minute talk can often (because of the discipline of compression) be better than a 60-minute talk, so these short books encourage authors to offer focused gems of explanation.

6. Our authors rock! Most of them have given TED Talks (and these are included by the way, in each book as a video epilogue), but the books dig into their subject matter far more deeply than their TED Talk ever could. A TED Talk is typically 2,000 words. These are 10x more. From the future of humanity to the secrets of happiness, these books offer transformational thinking.

Over the last few years, we’ve built a publishing framework — a coupling of services, tools, and data — that meets the needs of publishers of any scale and helps brings long-term sustainability to web-native content.

Publishers are increasingly facing the daunting decision of how to power their future on the Web. The nature of the challenges are so important, so personal, that attempting to describe the benefits of one approach over another in an easily digestable checklist of features is almost impossible. (We know, we’ve tried.) Instead, we think the best way of understanding if a system is right for you is understanding the thought process, motivations, and philosophy behind its stewards.

What follows is an in-depth look at how the team at Marquee approached these problems, the mistakes we made, and what we've learned. It introduces you to our platform in the same way we came to understand the nature and role of our business, because we think that's the only way for you to know if we're a good choice for your project.

One morning in February 2012, we clicked a button and launched a Kickstarter campaign. We wanted to build MATTER — a publication based around a new way to create really great long-form journalism about science, technology and the future. What followed was an extraordinary vote of confidence in the idea: by the time the campaign closed a few weeks later, 2,500 people had helped us raise $140,000, almost three times the amount we’d targeted.

More recently, MATTER received another incredible vote of confidence. One of our earliest Kickstarter backers was Ev Williams, the co-founder of Twitter and Blogger. After we launched, Ev told us about his new company, Medium. He and his team want Medium to be the best place on the internet to read and create high-quality content, and they suggested that we become part of that project.

It didn’t take us long to realise how much sense that made for MATTER. We’re delighted to say that the move is complete: MATTER is now part of Medium. We’ve put together this FAQ to explain the thinking behind the move and the impact it will have on what we do.

MATTER IS the home for in-depth journalism about the ideas that are shaping our future. Our stories range across science, technology, medicine and the environment: everything from corporate misdeeds and untold environmental scandals to radical new scientific ideas and the people behind them.

MATTER ISN'T quite a website, but it's not really a magazine and it's not exactly a book publisher, either. Instead, MATTER is something else. We focus on producing individual long-form stories for consumption on any device, whether it's your computer, phone, e-reader or tablet. And we're trying to make it a sustainable way of paying for the hard work required to produce the best reporting.

MATTER IS YOU. We got started in unusual fashion: with a Kickstarter campaign in early 2012 that raised more than $140,000 from ordinary people who believed in what we wanted to achieve. That support got us off the ground. It also convinced us that the people who are committed to MATTER — our Kickstarter backers, our Members — are central to our success. So we try and get them involved in what we do as much as we can. So far that includes our "editorial board" (an innovative collaborative commissioning process) and the opportunity ask questions directly to our contributors. And there's more on the way.

A Snippet refers to a new type of book format. Each book is designed to be short and engaging. While the author can have unlimited chapters, each one is limited to 1,000 words max. This makes for a very quick read. It also “forces” the author to be concise with the knowledge they wish to impart in each chapter. In this world where people are used to digesting their news and information in, well Snippets, this format is perfect for everyone.

In addition to being short and to the point, Snippet allows the reader to engage with the author in new ways by adding media and social tools such as videos, photos, and direct connection to social media. The book I read, Let Go by Pat Flynn, provided an official hashtag to use on Twitter. These unique features really help to separate a Snippet book from a regular book and serves to enhance the reader’s experience. A quick note for those of you with an iPad. Please make sure the side switch is unlocked before viewing the videos. As a default this switch is set to Mute your iPad, as I found out trying to watch the videos. Don’t commit #userfail like I did.

The easiest way to publish rich content. Get paid for your hard work from readers that love and appreciate what you do.

NOT A DEVELOPER? NO PROBLEM.
Start your own iOS Newsstand magazine today – software development skills not required.