Jux just rolled out a new smooth-scrolling, edge-to-edge, touch-driven view for its eye-popping personal publishing platform. After launching on the desktop Web in August and shipping its iPad view in October, Jux has now polished its Web experience for all the key screen sizes.
Optimizing for the phone forced Jux to get smarter. It now uses facial recognition for smart cropping of thumbnail images. Today's update also comes with more optimization, caching and content distribution to help these loud, bold sites load as quickly as possible.
Evernote has expanded its read-later browser extension, Clearly, to Firefox. The extension first launched on Chrome in November. Clearly slides in a cleaned-up view of Web articles without ads or navigation, making content more pleasant to read. It automatically turns multi-page articles to single pages.
It's also a content shifting tool. Clicking the Evernote elephant icon in the sidebar saves the cleaned up version to your Evernote account so it can be read on all devices. The article viewer also comes with three themes, and beyond that, all the fonts, colors and alignments can be customized.
Comedian Louis C.K. was tired of seeing his fans pay marked-up prices to enjoy his work. The bloated costs of show tickets and add-on fees for myriad middlemen had become "f---ing brutal" for consumers, C.K. told Rolling Stone recently. Thankfully, we're no longer trapped in the 20th century with its top-heavy, restricted, one-way model of content distribution. So C.K. took to the Web.
His experiment, as he called it, was to see if he could self-release one of his stand-up comedy specials on the Internet without paying for others to produce, edit and distribute the material, all of which drive up the cost paid by fans. It was a somewhat bold gamble, even if the model had been tested successfully by a few big name bands and musicians. Would it work for stand-up comedy?
The latest forward-thinking digital initiative from The Guardian, n0tice.com, has just announced a healthy revenue sharing model for administrators of its hyperlocal message boards. n0tice is a location-powered Web community that combines a little citizen journalism with the future of classified ads. Owners can now earn 85% of the revenue generated on their noticeboards, while the Guardian takes 15%.
Alongside these local message boards are targeted ads for products, offers and events. They're styled to match the forums, and they don't intrude on the experience. Participants can post offers for free, and they can upgrade to Featured placement for £1/day (or the local equivalent). Payment is handled via PayPal, so n0tice can have an international reach.
We're not out of the woods yet, but Web publishing is starting to hit its stride. Product offerings are getting smarter, prices are getting better and, most importantly, the content is getting more interesting. We might not even be half way to the future of publishing yet, but the industry is picking up steam.
There are new ways to read, new ways to write and new ways to advertise. Publishing is a rapidly changing high-tech business now, so the tools change the content and vice versa. Established publishers have lots of inertia, so the changes won't sweep the world overnight, but here in the blogosphere, there's a palpable sense of excitement. Here's a tour of Web publishing's next level.
The media and news industry, after 10 years of disruption and economic torture, finally thought that it had gotten a step ahead. Publishers were in on the ground floor when the tablet revolution started with products ready to go even before Steve Jobs introduced us to the original iPad. The marriage of tablets to publishing would be a boon for everybody.
The honeymoon has not been sweet.
Publishers did not have the tools to create fully functional magazines from the very start. Sure, they were nice looking, but that was about it. Over the last two years, though, publishers and developers have created dynamic tools that allow the news media to create apps that do not just meet user expectations, but go beyond them.
I just fell in love with Calepin. It's a blogging tool that gives you an instant, minimal website using two of geeks' favorite little helpers: Dropbox and Markdown. It is nerdy, but only a little bit, and I'll talk you through the whole thing. By the end of this short tutorial, I bet you'll want one.
First, you need an account. Go to Calepin.co and register your user name. It's early; you can probably get whatever you want. Next, log in with Dropbox. Calepin will create a folder in your Dropbox that it will watch for text files written in Markdown. When you click the big 'Publish' button on the Calepin site, it will publish all the documents as a blog at [user name].calepin.co. Here's mine, for example. The blog's appearance is spare and relaxing. It's a great place to just stick your thoughts up on the Web. Don't know what a Dropbox or a Markdown is? Don't worry. You'll quickly get the gist.
PressBooks, a simple online book production tool built on WordPress, launches to the public today. It lets authors use a content management system they already know to produce ePubs, typeset PDFs and other XML formats, as well as a Web version. The Web version can be private, or it can be free or paywalled to the public.
PressBooks has spent six months working with authors and publishers to refine and test the tool. Big-time publishers like O'Reilly Media give rave reviews. This team is "dreaming up what 'book production' should mean (or, some of it anyway) in 2012 and beyond."
In the dead of night on Monday, November 14, Zuccotti Park in New York City was raided by police. In the preceding days, there were crackdowns at several of the major Occupy protests around the country. The effort had apparently been coordinated between cities. Monday night's actions against the original Occupy Wall Street encampment were stern, heavy enough to bring a decisive end to the protest. But the raid only served to turn up the heat in New York and around the country.
As they have since the Occupation began, people on the ground fired up their smartphones to report the events as they happened, and curators around the Web gathered and retweeted the salient messages. But early on in the raid, mainstream media outlets began reporting that the police were barring their reporters from entering the park. The NYPD even grounded a CBS News helicopter. The night had chilling implications for freedom of the press. But the news got out anyway. The raw power of citizen media - and the future of news envisioned by a site called Storify - thwarted the media blackout.
Flipboard launches a new update today that introduces Flipboard Accounts, giving users the ability to sign in and personalize their favorite sections and social networks in the iPad feed reader. This feature heralds the imminent arrival of Flipboard for iPhone, which today's announcement acknowledges is "forthcoming."
Personalization allows people who share an iPad to keep separate Flipboard arrangements, but it will also sync the iPad version with the upcoming iPhone release. Today's update also adds integration with Tumblr and photography site 500px alongside Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, Google Reader and Instagram as built-in options for browsing those networks in Flipboard's clean, magazine-style layout.
