This morning, Parse.ly launched Dash, a content management system smart enough to make a blogger weep with joy. It analyzes the Web to show publishers what's hot. It tracks trends within the site, revealing what works for the audience. It points out when old posts are getting popular again. It follows individual authors over time and shows how their coverage performs. It shows where traffic is coming from to improve targeting. In short, it helps publishers plan.
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.
Yesterday WordPress launched version 3.3, named "Sonny," in honor of the great jazz saxophonist Sonny Stitt. The release has two goals: To make the editing process easier for return users, and help introduce new bloggers to the platform.
The new toolbar is a combination of the admin bar and the old Dashboard header. There's now support for drag-and-drop media uploads. The new dropdown menu has become a hover menu. WordPress has also added touch support for iPad. WordPress users who have felt frustrated over the co-editing experience will find this update especially satisfying. Now, the red bar that tells you if someone is editing the post will only pop up if another is actually in the post. The 3.3 version has also added a Tumblr importer so that users can quickly bring their Tumblr blog into the mix.
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.
Ending months of rumors, Google today launched its own personalized news-reading app for tablets and smartphones. Google Currents, as it's called, is an app for iOS and Android that presents content from magazines, news sites and blogs in a format that's far more digestible on mobile devices.
It lands in a somewhat crowded space occupied by offerings from Yahoo and AOL as well as from startups like Flipboard, Flud, Pulse and Zite, which was acquired by CNN earlier this year. Even before today's launch Google Currents was billed as a potential "Flipboard killer." After taking Google's new app for a spin, we're not convinced it poses a credible threat.
Yesterday, WordPress announced WordAds, a program for hosted WordPress.com blogs to make some money off their sites. The first ads will come from the WordPress partnership with Federated Media announced at Web 2.0 this October. Interested users must apply to join WordAds, and it requires a custom domain, a service for which WordPress charges.
In return, WordPress is offering independent publishers a chance to make money on the WordPress platform. WordPress already provides a healthy living for thousands of self-employed developers, and now publishers have a chance to earn money from their WordPress content, too.
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."
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.
Before Apple even officially announced the iPad, traditional publishers started to get excited about the potential of the device. Much like the iPod did for music, Apple's rumored tablet could help them make the transition to digital, and perhaps even allow them to solve the problem the Web couldn't: monetization.
The iPad finally did launch, followed by its slimmer, fast successor and magazines and newspapers began developing native apps for the device. More recently, iOS 5 came along and brought with it Newsstand, a feature that gives publications special treatment and a storefront from which they can sell subscriptions (if they can stomach Apple's revenue share scheme).
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.
German science, technology and medical publisher Springer Science+Business Media, will digitize its entire catalog of books back to 1840 by the end of the coming year, including works by Einstein, Niels Bohr and Sir John Eccles and Rudolf Diesel. (Yes, that Rudolf Diesel.)
The books, 70% of which are in English and nearly 30% in German, will total 65,000 titles when the project is finished.
