Today, a NYC-based startup called Jux has launched a personal publishing platform that kicks a field goal right over the heads of Tumblr and the post-blogging crowd. It's a big, beautiful, dynamic tool full of splashy images and sharp Web fonts. It offers six kinds of basic posts: BlockQuote, Article, Photo, Video, SlideShow, and CountDown. You start from there and build huge, full-screen posts that suck the viewer in. It's like a blog that can crank out whole About.me or Flavors.me pages for every post. You have to see it to get how powerful it is.
Power, of course, is not everything when it comes to publishing. Jux isn't lean like Posterous or clean like WordPress, whose publishing platform powers nearly 15% of the world's websites. Compared to blog posts that feel more like pages, a Jux post is more like a Times Square billboard. It takes some time to load. There's an animated loading bar between screens, especially when editing. But it's worth the wait. Perusing a Jux profile is like taking a deep dive into someone's ideas.
Yesterday I wrote about the lack of big ideas in tech media, in response to a New York Times op-ed about the "post-idea world." I basically complained that there is too much mindless pap on Techmeme these days, most of it about business deals and rumors. Where are the "big idea" articles about technology, I wondered.
It's all very well moaning about the state of things, but we at ReadWriteWeb aspire to be a part of the solution too. So I'm going to ask an open question and I'd really appreciate any and all responses to it. Ideally by leaving a comment here on RWW. Alternatively: reply on Twitter (to @RWW), comment on the RWW Facebook Page, or leave a comment on my Google Plus profile. The question is simply this: what technology topics or ideas would you like to read about?
Big ideas aren't prevalent anymore, posited academic and author Neal Gabler in a New York Times op-ed. "We are living in an increasingly post-idea world," he wrote, "a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that can't instantly be monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them, the Internet notwithstanding."
While this could be seen as just another variation of the "Internet makes you dumb" argument, a favorite of academics and contrarian technology writers, Gabler's article touched a nerve for me. As I look around at my own industry, tech news, there is certainly no shortage of content. But ideas... those we're bereft of. Tech media today is driven by deals and speculation. There are plenty of ideas-driven people, too, but you generally won't find them at the top of Techmeme anymore.
The acronym "YASNS" is well-known in Web geek circles. It stands for Yet Another Social Networking Service. In 2011, perhaps the acronym should be "YAUSNS": Yet Another Useless Social Networking Service. Even large, otherwise successful tech companies aren't immune to YAUSNS. In September last year, Apple launched a music social network called Ping. It's basically 'Twitter for music,' however it's been a fizzer - despite being embedded right into iTunes. Another company at risk of what I'll now call The Ping Effect is Amazon, which released Kindle Profiles in March of this year. It's a social network for reading, but so far it hasn't set the world on fire. A commenter on my Google Plus profile called it "The Ping of Books."
Also in March, business social network LinkedIn launched a social news service called LinkedIn Today. Is this service needed, or is it simply duplicating Techmeme, Google News and similar social news sites? Let's find out...
Movieclips wants to be the HBO of YouTube. Today the company is announcing that it is bringing a network of searchable and interactive scenes from movies of the major studios to YouTube that allows viewers to watch clips from movies, play games and search for scenes by any type of search query imaginable.
Movieclips has been spending two years going through movies from six of the seven major studios (except Disney) adding metadata to clips and scenes to make a searchable network of movie scenes. Users can search props, locations, actors and more. "We see YouTube as the new cable," said co-founder Zach James. "We want to be its movie network."
The New York Times has launched a public testing site called beta620 where it will try out new web experiments, some of which will eventually "graduate" to become full-fledged New York Times products. The site launched with seven projects, including instant search, richer community tools, and an HTML5 Web app for the NYTimes Crossword Puzzle.
The site's welcome post says beta620 "will also be a place where Times developers interact with readers to discuss projects, and incorporate community suggestions into their work." This audience-friendly approach is a stark reversal from the company's past approach to web innovation.
Magazine publisher Condé Nast has added to its diverse portfolio of mobile app offerings with the release of Goings On for Android and iOS, a free, ad-supported app for browsing arts and culture events from the New Yorker's weekly listings. In addition to event listings, reviews and useful maps, the app offers audio tours of stores, restaurants, neighborhoods and more by New Yorker authors.
This free app supplementing the magazine plays a similar role to Condé's GQ Style Guide. The publisher isn't just making magazine apps - it's creating an ecosystem.
Magazine publisher Condé Nast reports that The New Yorker's iPad version now has 100,000 readers, including about 20,000 people who have subscribed for $59.99 per year. In addition, "several thousand" people buy single weekly issues for $4.99.
The New Yorker's success on the iPad makes sense on multiple levels. Its rich illustrations and long-form content fit both the iPad's laid-back, hands-on use case and its target audience. But the app also fits into a successful and growing category of reading apps that clear out all the clutter and just focus on the reading. As publishers of other high-profile magazine apps see interest waning, a successful genre of iPad magazine may finally be emerging.
AOL is launching its entry into the increasingly crowded iPad magazine space with the new application AOL Editions. The app is somewhat similar to other high-profile efforts like The Daily, Flipboard, Plus and Zite, but attempts to find its niche by offering a personalized, social, once-daily experience which is also publisher-friendly.
But most importantly, in an effort to further define itself, AOL has made the bold decision to forgo real-time updates in favor of a magazine that you can actually finish reading throughout the course of the day.
This chapter in Web history is marked by a number of big companies doing business at a small scale. Groupon, LivingSocial, and even tech companies with a broader reach like Google and Facebook are relentlessly working on ways to match consumers with the local businesses all around them, even though these companies might be headquartered far away.
They're serving a market for ads and coupons that used to be the domain of the local newspaper, but if you listen to their executives talk, news media get only a passing mention. Are these targeted local deals services cutting news organizations out of the market that used to keep them afloat, just like Craigslist did to their classifieds?
