The digital product team over at NPR is always busy tinkering away and creating new ways for people to consume the news organization's rich library of content. Their latest innovation, called the Infinite Player, is a stripped-down, browser-based tool for listening to NPR content in a serendipitous, yet personalized fashion.
If the player's interface reminds you of Pandora, it's no accident. The team deliberately borrowed from personalized media services like Pandora, Flipboard and Zite when building out the Infinite Player. Its controls are sparse, containing only a few buttons. Among them are a pair of icons for voting stories up and down, much as one would on Pandora. In time, the player learns what you're interested in and plays back content accordingly.
Amazon announced today that the Kindle Fire Newsstand will offer over 400 full-color subscription publications. Anyone who subscribes before March 1, 2012 will get a free three-month trial of Vanity Fair, GQ, Wired and 14 other Condé Nast magazines. Amazon's new tablet hits stores next week, and Amazon has boosted the initial shipment twice to keep up with demand.
This is one of the most anticipated tablet launches since Apple's iPad, and the comparison is inevitable. But there are lots of differences between the two devices for consumers. Still, Apple's Newsstand feature of iOS 5 has turned out to be a huge success for the publishing industry, thanks to the iPad. Amazon is using the Kindle Fire to confront that head on, right down to the name.
Storify, our beloved storytelling tool for the social Web, has just launched a redesign of its homepage that features top stories, topics and users. It also displays a banner across the top, filled with clickable links to the people of Storify, bearing a clear message: "All the stories happening on social media..."
Those aren't the words of a mere curation tool. That sounds like a news site. The homepage of Storify is now a destination that displays the big stories of the day according to citizens of the Web. That's homepage material for anyone who spends time on social networks, which means it's a natural place to put some ads and turn Storify into a media business.
People didn't understand the iPad immediately. No one believed in the form factor. "Just a big iPhone," people called it. But it caught on, it took off, and now consumers can't let go of their tablets. The intimate, intuitive interface has created its own use case. People curl up with the device and they read.
Publishers and app developers have provided a bonanza of ways to read on the iPad and iPhone. Some are free, some cost money, some require monthly subscriptions. All of them are vying for your attention in that new, valuable hour or two of tablet time in the evenings. But one app, Instapaper, sits in the iPad Hall of Fame on iTunes, pushing forward reader behavior just like the iPad itself. Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper, answered some questions for us about where this is all heading.
The Web may have opened up and democratized the once top-heavy world of publishing, but the next frontier in digital publications is still young. While anybody can master the tools needed to publish a blog, putting out a rich, magazine-like digital publication for tablets is still cost prohibitive for some.
The folks behind Letter to Jane, an arts magazine for the iPad, are well aware of these challenges. They are not only using KickStarter to help raise funds to produce their next issue, but they're open sourcing the code behind it, offering backers the ability to create their own magazines in the future.
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A South Korean startup called Shakr aims to use the processing power of its users' distributed computers to create video news coverage of breaking events faster than international news giants can with human labor. Shakr unveiled its use of WegGL technology, which uses a computer's powerful graphics processing card to extend the capabilities of Javascript in the browser, at TechCrunch's startup event today in Beijing, China.
If you're comfortable having a robot read the news to you and if the company can withstand intellectual property challenges, Shakr could be one of the most interesting new entrants into the robot reporting market. There are lots of robots trying to grow up to get jobs as journalists. Efforts like Shakr seek to arbitrage the gap between the surplus of text and image content available on almost any topic and the scarcity of video to fill the market demand. It's smart.
Jux, the boldest, loudest big-screen personal publishing platform around, has just made its natural leap to the iPad. As of today, the multimedia publishing platform that launched in August now supports touch-powered browsing. It's iPad-optimized, but all it needs is a tablet browser. Just go to jux.com and dive in.
When I covered Jux's desktop launch, I called it "post-blogging." I intended some irony then, but now that I've touched Jux on an iPad, I take it seriously. Very seriously. The experience is continuous between the desktop and the tablet. For all its media-heavy intensity, Jux is a responsive design. This is no boring WordPress Onswipe theme for a blog. This is the publisher coming to life through every screen.
At the Web 2.0 Summit today, Federated Media Publishing and Automattic, parent company of WordPress, announced an agreement to provide advertising rights for U.S. WordPress.com bloggers. Over 24 million sites are hosted on WordPress.com, and users will now be able to opt into a topically targeted advertising program.
Federated Media positions WordPress advertising as a more focused alternative to social media buys. The campaigns are content-driven, offering sponsored content curation, sponsored posts and semantic conversation targeting for ads.
Sixteen months after a federal judge threw out Viacom's $1 billion copyright lawsuit against Google, the two companies are back in court. Specifically, Viacom is asking an appeals court to revisit its case against YouTube, which they say is guilty of a whole lot of deliberate copyright infringement.
The original case was thrown out last year when a U.S. District Court judge ruled that YouTube was protected by the "safe harbor" provision of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), which essentially argues that site owners are immune from the legal implications of what the site's users do, such as uploading copyrighted material.
Commenting system Livefyre has announced version 2.0 of its platform, introducing new features to bring conversations from the social Web into on-site comments. SocialSync grabs related Twitter and Facebook comments automatically, so there's always a conversation on the page, even if no one has commented yet directly. It also adds @ mentions from within the comment box, allowing users to tag and notify their friends on those services, drawing them into the conversation.
"Everything we're doing is about increasing engagement on publisher content," says Livefyre CEO Jordan Kretchmer. By drawing in conversations from where they're happening on the social Web, Livefyre sites will become the hubs of conversation about their own content again. People who prefer to chat on social networks can still be involved, but sites will still benefit from those conversations on their own pages. Twitter and Facebook are built in at launch, and Google Plus is coming soon.
