I used Jux, because it lets me design the whole experience out to every edge of every screen. Jux just launched crop control for photos, so the Jux album of my trip looks just right on every device. A Jux isn't a blog. It's more like a portfolio. Each piece stands on its own.

Jux appreciates how sensuous and tangible the Web can be now. We've got so many ways to push and pull and play with the content. It flows onto different screens with different input methods. Some we touch with our fingertips. Others we click with a cursor. The stories have to live in all those places.

But to do a great job of that on our own is hard work, over the heads of most of us. Jux does the hard part for us and makes our decisions easy. We just choose the stories we want to tell and the objects with which we want to tell them. Jux puts them where they're supposed to go.

It launched on the Web in August. It was optimized for the iPad in October. In December, the full-screen iPhone view arrived. Now, regardless of which device you use to visit a Jux, you see a version that fits the screen and responds to the right clicks, taps or swipes.

It uses a mixture of smart algorithms and basic cues from the user to shift around the content ever so slightly, so you don't have to worry much about how your Jux will look on the different screens.

Jux has six kinds of posts so far: BlockQuote, Article, Photo, Video, SlideShow and CountDown. You can upload photos from your computer, grab them from a URL, or log straight into Flickr, Facebook or Instagram and get photos from there.

You can choose the colors and typography, as well as the basic shape of the layout. You can also apply some interesting photo effects. Jux will rearrange all these things for different devices while being true to your design decisions.

When you're done, you can share the URL of your Jux, or you can embed it straight into a blog post or webpage. It's smart enough to reflow into any screen.

Jux is still a little slow on handheld devices. But the promise of the tool is still exciting. There's no need to surrender your stories to Facebook's lightbox and other cruft anymore. You don't have to worry about blogging your exploits on a regular basis. You're free from the concept of a timeline. Jux is a hint of the true promise of computerized storytelling.

My Jux SlideShow from my trip to San Francisco:

The site is unique in the news-curating space in that it uses trends from the Twitter accounts Reuters and its journalists follow to arrange headlines: in effect, the news agency is automating editing and story selection and putting it in the hands of "everyone from Nouriel Roubini and Jenna Wortham to John McCain and Rachel Sterne."

News organizations have increasingly warmed toward social media in the past several years. New York Times reporters like Brian Stelter and David Carr routinely tweet about stories they are covering and offer commentary to reactions about their reporting. Small and large outlets have used live-tweeted breaking news events and press conferences.

But the Reuters effort appears to be a major step forward in using social media to shape the news cycle. Presumably, story selection for the main news page will remain in the hands of Reuters editors.

The difference between that page and Social Pulse earlier this morning show that what Reuters editors think is important (Facebook IPO, Jobless Claims Fall and a story about the Federal Reserve, among others) is not necessarily in line with what's getting traffic on Social Pulse, which was topped by a story about a drop in Iranian currency, an increase in planned layoffs last month and a feature on Swiss watch sales.

Of the three articles at the top of Social Pulse, only one, the story about layoffs, was a Reuters story.

This is the most user-friendly White House in history. It was a nice experiment in Web-enabled democracy. But despite the great camera angles and the believable-but-composed real-world folks, it stretched the definition of "social media" pretty thin. User-submitted content is good, and the hand-picked live participants get to be involved, but for most of us, it's no different from television.

The Hangout dynamics did offer some back-and-forth between participants and the president. The action didn't feel scripted. On the contrary, it felt like people talking over each other, just like a video chat usually does, except there was a moderator to occasionally interrupt and move things along.

But for most of the audience, it was a YouTube stream. The link was posted all over Google+ by various accounts, including the White House, YouTube and Google Politics & Elections, but the comments there were spammed-up and useless. It wasn't a social event except for the selected participants.

In that sense, it wasn't much different from the president's live event at Facebook last April. It was good publicity for a social Web platform, pro-Web PR for the White House, and a TV-like experience for the rest of America.

This was certainly a game-changing event. It was a demonstration of YouTube's looming succession to television as the most influential video platform. This was a triumph of a tech company over media companies. The production values were high, the program was engaging, and the content was timely. But for the public, it was no more of a paradigm shift than changing the TV channel.

Did you watch the White House Google+ Hangout? What did you think? Share your reactions in the comments.

It does all of this by analyzing the billions of page views it tracks anonymously across its whole user base. Parse.ly started as a feed reader for pros in 2009, and Dash expands its capabilities with predictive analytics for one's own site. The software gets a sense of what topics and stories are most important and whether they're trending up or down. That's a great thing for publishers. Is it good for readers? I can't wait to find out.

Online Omniscience

It's no secret that blogging is a game of page views. Without good analytics, blogging is all about watching, intuition and guesswork. After you've done some of that, you write some spaghetti posts, throw them at the wall and see what sticks. Dash gives publishers the motherlode of data about page views and how to get them. It shows them the past and the present of their site, and its ability to measure Web-wide trends offers a glimpse of the future.

Dash offers three tiers of services starting at $499 per month. The basic "Track" tier enables internal tracking of authors, topics, sections and referrals, as well as predictive analysis of trends and real-time site stats. Tier 2, "Plan," adds the Web-wide trend analysis, search and filtering within the analytics, customizable dashboards for editors and downloadable reports. The top tier, "Promote," measures shares and impact across the social Web, and it sends email alerts to editors and writers when something urgent comes up.

Installing Dash requires nothing more than dropping some JavaScript into the site's footer. That's enough to capture the traffic and put the dashboard to work.

A tool like Dash gives a site a huge advantage in the short term. While some sites putter along without this kind of detailed feedback, the ones who have it could dominate. The ability to see exactly which topics and events need covering, and exactly how to cover them for a particular audience, is a sort of online omniscience.

Vision, Voice & Tactics

But hopefully, in the long term, this will lead to a new generation of content sites that all have these abilities. If every publisher could know its audience this well, there would be no more spaghetti-against-the-wall, side-boob-heavy, all-caps-headlines blogging tactics.

This week, Gawker is experimenting by letting writers go crazy with these old-school page view tricks, hopefully to prove the point that they aren't what the market really wants. But if all publishers had Dash or something like it, we'd all know that. Then the differences between sites would be all about editorial vision and voice, not just tactics.

It will be even clearer who's playing to the crowd and who stands out. Sites who just play the predictive analytics game will all start to look the same. But the gift of a tool like Dash is that it helps sites get to know their audience. It highlights the surprising things. The sites that stand out will be the ones who know their audience so well that they can consistently surprise them.

Parse.ly was co-founded by CEO Sachin Kamdar and CTO Andrew Montalenti and is based in New York City. Check them out at Parse.ly.

I caught up with Berry this week to learn more about his experience growing HuffPost and what he's planning for his new projects. Following is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Paul Berry: We're 120 million unique visitors a month, 31-day view by Google Analytics. We're at 1.7 billion pageviews, still growing fast. To give an indicator of the velocity, at acquisition [about a year ago], we were 55 million uniques and about 700 million pageviews. So just by sheer volume of traffic and audience, those are big numbers.

The other piece is the complexity of my CMS, and sort of how wide and deep the technology is. The team that I was leading as CTO of the Huffington Post Media Group, I had product, design, and engineering for the Media Group. There are a bunch of domains that are powered by the technology. When I started at Huffington Post, it was metaphorically day two. We were 3 million unique visitors and 70 million pageviews a month and there were three of us in the tech team. The team that Tim Dierks takes over as the new CTO is about 220 people.

Paul Berry at Google I/O, 2009. Image by David Newman, ipadportraits.com.

And these 220 people are...

That includes a lot of designers and product and project managers. The core of Huffington Post... we had some innovations in how we would put the team together that were built out of a combination of our own character and culture and out of necessity. I was born in Mexico City, my wife is Bulgarian. International, I always knew, would mean a great deal to me. And in the last ten years and in previous jobs, I started to work out: How can you truly put together a dynamic global team? That was vital to Huffington Post.

The election year growth was driven by figuring that out. It was pretty stressful - we had no money. I couldn't just buy another server. And we had so much to accomplish. And what everyone wants from their tech team is to pull an all-nighter every single night. But you know that's not sustainable, so you know as much as you want it you can't have it. You can actually do it by playing that timezone game and passing batons. That was insanely vital to all of our growth at HuffPost. Literally HuffPost has people on every continent in every time zone. Eastern Europe and Latin America, India, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Philippines.

What were some of the technical challenges you had to deal with?

Scaling was always a point of pride that we never talked about. And we never talked about security. If you're spending a lot of time talking about security, it's because you've gone through a horrible Gawker hack type of moment, and it's terrible. You do internally talk about security, and you have a security team, and you do a lot to make it happen. But at the board or ops level, if you're talking about security or scalability, you're generally suffering. It's a point of pride that that was never a big topic at ops or board meetings. We had very, very few moments of actual downtime.

Facebook, Google, and Twitter were all fairly frustrated with the media landscape - how slow media companies were to implement stuff, how slow they were to be creative and to push the envelope. And that became the roadmap pillars: Editorial efficiency and pushing the envelope with partners. A lot of the stuff that I plan to take into the incubator and into the new company is that culture of pushing those limits.

So what are these new projects?

There's two parts to it. Both, unfortunately, I have to remain a little stealth about, or I guess a lot, annoyingly. Part of my contract with AOL allowed me to work on things during this transition. So I've actually had a team working on Rebel Mouse for a while. I'm really excited about releasing some alpha and beta stuff in recent months.

Rebel Mouse is the startup company that's well defined - it has its name and its logo and it's a really well-defined concept that we're deep into. The incubator is a way to give us space to throw a lot of stuff up on the wall. It's not meant to be a 500 Startups thing, where there's a ton of companies. It's going to be much more sharing a technology stack and a social approach. And it will be social, web, and mobile that defines the companies that we end up creating. What we'll be doing is trying with a very small but elite and awesome team to take things into prototypes that start to gain real traction and go viral, and at that point, fund those into companies that we build into really big businesses.

My definition of viral is: We don't spend on marketing and ads. And that was another point of pride at Huffington Post. We never spent on SEM, it was always SEO. We never went and bought Facebook ads, we just did really well at social. These things have to have their own organic growth, where they hit this mark where you see them growing by themselves. Then you realize we have something now that we can double down on and go raise money and built that toward a big business.

Are there any specific technologies that have been particularly useful to you at HuffPost?

When I started with HuffPost about six years ago, there was still debate about whether open source would win or not. I think that has been answered. The open source stack - whichever you end up using - you have tremendous potential. It's crazy how much has been built out the last five years. The trick has really been to keep up with those sorts of things the way you keep up with a Facebook, or a Google, or a Twitter, and their product releases.

One of the surprises has been that MySQL - when Oracle bought MySQL, everyone thought it would die - and it's actually very much alive. We use Redis ("sort of a database alternative") a lot at Huffington Post, for example. There are some of these core technology stacks and open-source libraries and etc. that we'll definitely be using at the incubator.

Zite (now owned by CNN), at its core, is a data-parsing engine tied to the social graph. Its roots are buried to a social discovery search engine called Worio that the team eventually folded to create Zite. Article URLs are parsed out of the social graph, mapped and weighted. How does the company pull this all off? Today, Zite gives users a peek under the hood.

"With Worio we were trying to bring contextual discovery to keyword search. For instance, if you searched for a restaurant in your neighborhood, Worio would recommend other restaurants in the area, or a foodie blog for your city. The basis of this technology was understanding the user's wider interests-something that translated almost directly into the core personalization algorithm of Zite," Klaas said.

In a blog post, Zite outlines how it curates content to your interests. There are five main points that revolve around the Three M's: "mining, modeling and matching." Zite mines content from your social Web, models that content along with the community and your particular interests. It then matches your interests to the content and the community to inform what it shows you in the app.

Let's break that down a little bit further. Think of Zite as an assembly line serving your URLs from your social network. There are steps an URL must go through before it appears in your reader.

Zite finds what is interesting by monitoring URLs shared through whatever social networks you decide to hook up to the app such as Twitter and Delicious. It then throws out spam (because there is ALWAYS spam) and associates each URL with the user that shares them. Zite will then calculate the credibility of that user, like assigning a weight to a variable. More popular users with original content that is often shared will have greater weights. Zite will then queue that content is something to potentially show the user.

The URL then moves down the assembly line. Zite takes these "vetted" URLs and strips out all extraneous, non-readable material. That includes HTML formatting, scripting codes etc. The text of the document is then analyzed via text mining and term extraction to capture what the content is about. It parses names, dates, places and other topical information. Reading an article about Google CEO Larry Page? Zite will be able to know that and give you an option to get more news about Page. Same with authors and reporters. Zite will strip the metadata of the post. Want to read more from ReadWriteWeb's Dan Rowinski? Zite can show you more of my articles.

Zite then looks to model the community. Think of it like recommendations from Amazon or Netflix. The same heuristic model applies. Relationships are correlated between users and documents based on what the app has captured from the social Web. The creates a map of document-to-user relationships. It then condenses that information to match your interests later.

Zite takes your preferences into account as well. If you were reading this article in the app, you can respond to whether you enjoy reading it or not with a thumbs up or a thumbs down. It will likely parse categories for you like "apps," "iPad," or "Zite." It will ask if you want more content from the author and publication. This is what Zite calls "modeling you." You are the end of the conveyor belt that chooses what and how you consume said content. Zite will also throw out some stories that may not be in your direct preferences as a way for variety and discovery.

The end of the process is delivery. The app knows what you read and what you do not, makes comparison with high-scored documents and your interests and matches it to your topics. Age is factored in to the weight of a story with the score going down the older the story is. Finally, it is shipped to your iPad for consumption.

Zite has a fascinating process. I keep thinking of it in terms of the first Austin Powers movie when he is woken from being cryogenically frozen and is shipped down the line to re-acclimate himself to the real world. Instead of a overly-hairy Mike Myers, Zite casts a large net to capture URLs and redress them for your iPad consumption.

Verizon users get a free trial for one week. A monthly subscription costs $3.99, and an annual subscription costs $39.99. Publisher Greg Clayman told paidContent that The Daily currently has 100,000 paid subscribers on the iPad. It needs 500,000 to break even.

News Corp has put its weight behind The Daily. It hired a large, accomplished team, and chairman/CEO Rupert Murdoch reportedly invested $30 million personally. Murdoch says The Daily's costs are about "half a million dollars a week."

Though paid subscriptions have grown about 25% since it last reported numbers in October, that's a steep hill to climb. Staci Kramer at paidContent wrote in October that "[t]he shelf life of other News Corp. digital experiments suggests the Daily isn't likely to survive... unless it shows real signs it can get in the black."

David Brinker, The Daily's senior VP of business development and operations, wondered aloud to The Wrap yesterday whether it should have launched on February 2 of this year instead. Was The Daily ahead of its time? Brinker gave his publication a wide berth, saying the market could take three years to develop.

Meanwhile, since the launch of Apple's iOS 5 and Newsstand feature, The Daily has some competition for its vision of the future of newspapers. Expanding to Android devices gives The Daily a chance to diversify. Android tablets have begun to chip away at the iPad's dominance, occupying about 20% of the market.

News Corp has had some issues with digital media lately. After Murdoch joined Twitter, the company verified an impostor account pretending to be his wife.

How do you read your digital news?

To help out as the New Hampshire primary rolls around, Storify has put together 10 lessons from the Iowa Caucus for using social media to report on elections. Storify is the front page of social media news, and its curation tools are employed by all kinds of major media companies. Storify's list of election coverage strategies also includes some news. Storify has just released a search tool in beta, allowing users to search across previously "Storified" elements to embed them in your stories.

On the night of the Iowa Caucus, news organizations raced to keep up with the Web to report results, but social media are always hard to filter for quality information. Storify's tools helped news organizations like the New York Times, PBS Newshour and the Des Moines Register tune in to the signal and filter out the noise. "It was deadline curation at a new level," says Storify's Jeff Elder.

Here are Storify's 10 tips. Pay special attention to the golden rules at the end.

Today, PMN fulfilled a promise it made last year by doing something few would expect a newspaper company to do. Project Liberty, the company's tech startup incubator, is now open for business.

Digital Tools Fit For a News Publisher

CloudMine, one of the companies enrolled in the incubator, is a mobile backend-as-a-service provider for developers. It offers a pay-as-you-go API that hooks into their hosted server-side platform, freeing developers up from having to code custom backends. Why would a newspaper company have any interest in the success of such a tool? In PMN's case, a service like this could aid the company's ongoing efforts to bolster their mobile products and tablet strategy. Last year, the company made headlines by offering a $99 Android-based tablet with specialized news-reading apps for the Inquirer and Daily News. It was a bold move for a print media company, even if its earliest iteration was largely based around print-to-digital shovelware.

An even more obvious choice for a newspaper is SnipSnap, a smartphone app that lets consumers scan printed coupons to save and redeem later. SnipSnap CEO Ted Mann, a veteran of the newspaper industry, left his position as Digital Development Director at Gannett New Jersey last year to launch the startup. Today, Mann returns to the newspaper world, however temporarily, as he and his team set up shop in the Inquirer building. They will work alongside the newspapers' digital sales team, although SnipSnap is not officially a product of PMN.

Those on the editorial side will have the opportunity to collaborate with the folks working on ElectNext, a Web app that helps voters choose the best candidate in an upcoming election on the local, state and federal levels. The app works by asking users a series of questions about social and political issues and then matches them with the appropriate candidates.

Rebranding the "Newspaper"

Beyond the nature of the companies being incubated, there are few other obvious reasons for a newspaper company to make a move like this. For one, it serves as a marketing tactic to help rebrand a print publisher as a forward-thinking, tech-savvy multimedia company. By selling news-reading tablets and housing tech startups, PMN can paint itself as a media organization of the future rather than a soon-to-be relic.

Another formerly bankrupt news company, the Journal Register Company (now known as Digital First Media), is taking a similar approach this year by launching a tech incubator of its own, which will be geared toward startups specializing in advertising, editorial content and audience development. Like PMN, this move helps Digital First Media find innovative potential future partners and fits in with a larger strategy of rebranding itself for the twenty-first century.

PMN's experiment may be the first of its kind at a big city daily newspaper, but its not the first time that any publisher has tried incubating startups. Hearst and Conde Nast have both launched digital products built by in-house startups, some of which have nothing to do with the publishers' traditional businesses.

A few years ago, moves like this would have been seen as particularly revolutionary and forward-thinking. Today, they're still smart, but are more about survival than thinking ahead. As print revenues continue to decline, traditional news publishers desperately need to find new ways to both build their audiences and monetize their efforts in a way that can make up for the cash they keep hemorrhaging on the print side. The Web has made the former significantly easier than the latter.

Incubating tech startups may not lead to an explosion in revenue overnight, but it's a smart step in the right direction. As PMN CEO Greg Osberg said during a presentation at Temple University last year, "I want us to find the next Foursquare and house it at Philly.com." In time, revenue growth is more likely to come out of innovative efforts like these than from clinging to print and milking hideous Web banner ads for every last nickel.

Newspapers and Startups: A Two-Way Incubation

The intimate relationship PMN is establishing with local startups serves not only to fuel the growth of those new companies, but it may also help adapt the culture within the host organization itself. A lot of "future of news" types like to talk about how old media companies should adopt a startup culture if they want to survive. As anybody who's ever worked at a legacy media organization knows, that's far easier said than done.

Having had no other choice, PMN has already started the process by making moves like this, merging its newsrooms and demoting a top editor that they saw as not being digital-savvy enough. What better way to encourage a startup culture than by bringing startups down the hall from the newsroom?

Stearns, journalism and public campaign director at FreePress.net, used Storify to keep track of the arrests of credentialed journalists at Occupy Wall Street and other affiliated protests. He collected stories of journalists being cuffed, tackled and trapped, even as they shouted that they were members of the press. We highlighted his efforts in our article, "How Storifying Occupy Wall Street Saved The News," and we're thrilled that the Storify community is celebrating his great work.

The number 2 story of the year was Reuters social media editor Anthony De Rosa's 2011 Timeline of Protest, Revolution and Uprising. It's a sweeping document that covers all the Arab Spring uprisings, which were driven by online media in unprecedented ways.

Storify is a free social media journalism tool, allowing anyone to pull together pieces of the Web into embeddable stories. It's used by big publishers (including ReadWriteWeb) and everyday users alike, and all that work is featured side by side. To get a sense of what Storify can do, check out its top 10 most quoted tweets of the year.

If you're interested in learning to use Storify yourself, we've published a guide, "How To Curate Conversations With Storify."

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.

Jux creators have control over how their content is presented, and the new iPhone view preserves those choices with minimal adjustments. Some fonts sizes and colors are reined in to display properly within the constraints of a 3.5-inch screen.

The Web Is For Every Screen

As we wrote when the iPad version arrived, Jux proves that the Web is more than enough to deliver the best content experience for any screen. "Publish once, enjoy everywhere" is what CEO Ted Metcalfe wants to encourage.

Jux allows all the usual sharing, and today's update also allows reposting of other Juxers' stuff, like Tumblr has. But sharing features are not the center of attention. "We want to wrap it with other interactions and keep the focus on the stories and images," Metcalfe says.

Jux has maintained its business goals since launching this summer. Metcalfe says the goal is to do better than 25% monthly growth in traffic and creation. It's building an international audience, too, with lots of interest in the Philippines.

We like the way Jux thinks. It stands out boldly from the way personal publishing on the Web currently works. The best way to understand it is to see for yourself. Visit walkwithcheys.jux.com or willburns.jux.com to see Jux's chosen examples, and try it on different devices. You can also create one yourself at jux.com.

What do you want out of a personal publishing tool?

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.

Clearly brings Evernote into an increasingly crowded market dominated by dedicated read-later services like Instapaper and Read It Later. Like Clearly, Read It Later turns all articles into single-page views, but Instapaper intentionally doesn't, in order to respect the revenue decisions of publishers.

Evernote Clearly could gain significant traction if users find they enjoy having all their cloud-synced stuff in one place, instead of having a separate app for reading. Content shifting is a new trend, and Evernote, whose basic service is free, is well positioned to introduce the behavior to new users.

Chrome and Firefox are the next biggest browsers after Internet Explorer, so Evernote Clearly is now available to a sizable chunk of the market. Chrome actually surpassed Firefox for the first time this month, only three years after launching, but Firefox renewed its search deal with Google yesterday, giving it a new lease on life.

You can install Clearly for Chrome or Firefox.

Do you use a clean-reading service? Which one do you use?

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?

This was no YouTube amateur hour, either. Between producing the video and building out the PayPal-powered e-commerce site needed to sell it, expenses for the project were just over $200,000, some of which was offset by ticket sales. To help keep costs down, C.K. directed and edited the video himself. Much of the promotion of the project happened online too, including a Q&A with fans on Reddit.

As C.K. notes, he could have had a third party company produce and sell the material to fans. They would do most of the heavy lifting, but would also pass significant costs onto consumers and come with restrictions on viewing the content.

"This way, you only paid $5, you can use the video any way you want, and you can watch it in Dublin, whatever the city is in Belgium, or Dubai," wrote C.K. "I got paid nice, and I still own the video (as do you). You never have to join anything, and you never have to hear from us again."

A Win For the Web, Despite Piracy Risks

By making the video freely available, C.K. runs the obvious risk of having it uploaded to Bit Torrent and otherwise shared freely among people online. And there's no doubt many will do that. Yet his experiment shows that with an established enough brand, artists can produce and distribute their work by themselves, without the need for middlemen and extraneous costs.

It doesn't hurt that Louis C.K. is already a famous comedian who has had plenty of material produced and sold via the traditional approach, from stand-up specials to his ongoing television series. The DIY method may not work for up-and-coming artists at this point, but with developments like these, the Web is proving itself to be increasingly powerful for distributing and promoting one's work. Despite the conventional wisdom, as C.K.'s experiment has demonstrated, it's even possible to get paid.

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.

n0tice is a refreshing return to the community message board format refreshed for 2012. It keeps the features simple, offering basic social sharing, RSS subscription and embedded media, but it mostly stays out of the way and lets neighbors share news and events with each other.

It's a natural spot for some useful advertising. n0tice makes it easy to print out offers for posting in the real world, too, using QR codes to provide mobile Web links. The new revenue share is generous, creating potential for some real community-supported news under the Guardian's digital-first guidance.

Read more about this revenue sharing model on the n0tice blog.

n0tice presented at the Guardian's mobile business summit

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/guardians_n0tice_will_pay_citizen_moderators.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/guardians_n0tice_will_pay_citizen_moderators.php New Media Mon, 12 Dec 2011 10:15:00 -0800 Jon Mitchell 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.

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Reading was the first thing that had to change before the business of Web publishing could change. Hardware, specifically smartphones and tablets, set the ball rolling. The tablet form factor has been on our minds for a while, but it wasn't until the iPad's capacitive touchscreen that tablets took off with consumers.

BBC.com conducted an interesting study of tablet users this year, which showed that the hands-on interface provides users with a sense of control. That's the key to making engaging tablet content.

Ten-inch tablets are a fine way to view a website, but new kinds of interfaces can better take advantage of the touchscreen (and lack of physical keyboard). That's why software companies have gotten out ahead of publishers in providing reading apps that can turn any content into tablet content.

Flipboard is a celebrated example, and it also just launched an iPhone version. It can pull any Web content into its pleasant, touch-controlled layout, and it also offers publishers enhanced options for Flipboard-optimized content. Many other Web companies have aped this model, the latest of which is Google. None of these apps has emerged as the answer, but the new Google Currents has some interesting advantages for publishers.

The other vision of tablet reading is the "content-shifting" model, best exemplified by Instapaper. Instead of simply viewing Web content through a new layout, Instapaper saves clean versions of Web pages on demand. When you click the Instapaper bookmarklet on an article, that article is synced to your Instapaper in a cleaned-up version containing only plain text and embedded media.

Unlike Flipboard and the like, there's no value-add for publishers here. Rather, Instapaper is, in a way, a competitor. If publishers want to make money off the content they host themselves, they have to make their own reading experience that's better.

New Ways of Writing

To match this new way of reading, publishers have to be bold. The iPad and the Kindle Fire both offer newsstands for publication apps, inviting media organizations to make in-depth tablet experiences, not just paperless magazines.

One of the best examples we've seen so far is The Guardian iPad Edition, which launched the same day as Apple's iOS 5 Newsstand. It sneaks the Web view in here and there, and it streams in some content, but much of the experience is native, giving the reader that sense of control that matters so much on the tablet.

But the new rules in publishing are empowering independent content creators, too. Social media have created a new class of publishing, in which content created by everyone gets stitched together into a narrative. But Storify has blurred the line again, turning social media into a full-fledged sense-making platform that can power a news site more like the ones we're used to.

The do-it-yourself publishing platforms have also become more powerful. It's a great time to be a WordPress publisher, because it's creating revenue streams for independent content creators and developers alike. And then there are next-generation tools like Jux, which has blown the notion of the blog wide open. Now anyone can make an eye-popping, full-screen, multimedia periodical that's fully touch-enabled and reformats to fit the desktop, the tablet or the smartphone as needed.

New Ways of Advertising

New publishing tools are great, but what publishing really needs is new business models. Yes, some legacy media companies are beginning to see real revenue from digital content, but the fact is that Web users have gotten comfortable with content being free. That means more ads.

Fortunately, things are looking up on that front, too. For one thing, thanks to WordPress and its partnership with Federated Media, ad revenue streams are now available to independent bloggers, not just mainstream sites. But there is also a whole new kind of advertisement on the horizon, one that takes advantage of the new hardware and the touchscreen sense of control. As devices get increasingly powerful, the limits on Web publishing fall away.

Disclosure: Federated Media is also RWW's advertising partner.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/web_publishings_next_level.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/web_publishings_next_level.php New Media Fri, 09 Dec 2011 09:00:00 -0800 Jon Mitchell