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 categories vary here from browsers to cloud drives to mobile apps and more. But all of these services redefined a core use case for the Web, and some of them invented activities we didn't know we needed. Here are our top 10 Consumer Web Products of 2011:

This year, Google decided to make Chrome the most important Web browser in the world. It rocketed upwards in market share, now neck and neck with Firefox in the #2 browser spot, and if anyone can take down Internet Explorer, Google can.

Chrome released new features at a blistering pace this year. Its core mission in 2011 was to focus on Web apps. Google has renovated its Chrome Web Store for apps, as well as the New Tab page, where Chrome Web apps are launched. It's blurring the line between Web and native applications.

Some developers are working on a tablet-based version of Chrome that could bring the browser and its Web app ecosystem to all kinds of devices. Chrome in the Android ecosystem would be obvious, but the latest Google app for iPad looks just like Chrome, too, Web apps and all. Sneaky, eh?

Upcoming features include new APIs for text-to-speech and advanced audio features. Just this month, Google bought Apture, which could bring media-rich contextual search into every page in Chrome. And multiple accounts are coming to Chrome soon, so users can easily carry their browser data with them across devices.

Thanks in large part to the passionate work of outside developers, Chrome (and its open-source Chromium code base) is even influencing the way the Web in general works. Chrome and Firefox developers are working together on Web Intents, standard protocols to let independently developed Web apps communicate with each other. It's also pushing a new image format to make the whole Web faster by reducing the file size of images.

Browser choice is a personal matter for users, but no other browser comes close to Chrome's influence on the state of the art.

2. Dropbox

Dropbox is hot, and this year cemented its importance. By choosing a metaphor with which most computer users were already familiar, Dropbox has become a key player in the consumer cloud. It's a folder that syncs to the Internet. That's all there is to it. People and teams use it for backup as well as for syncing files across devices.

Its flexibility has also allowed Dropbox to become the back-end - the file system that wasn't - for exciting new apps and services, especially on mobile devices. Amazing life-hacking services like 1password use Dropbox for syncing. So do all the great third-party text apps for iOS, which doesn't have a native Google Docs client like Android does. There are even experimental blogging tools and website hosting services built on Dropbox.

Is Dropbox really the world's 5th most valuable startup, as Business Insider named it this year? We don't know yet. It has had some hiccups, such as a privacy scare earlier this year. But we also learned this year that Dropbox turned down a nine-digit acquisition offer from Steve Jobs in 2009. That's confidence.

3. iCloud

After being rebuffed by Dropbox, Apple set out to build its own file syncing between Macs and its iOS devices, replacing the embarrassing MobileMe desktop syncing service. iCloud shipped with iOS 5 in October of this year, and it's an effort to be even more basic than Dropbox. It's not even a folder; it just pushes files along behind the scenes, so your stuff is just there when you open apps to use it, whether on Mac OS or iOS.

It can sync contacts, calendars, media, documents, and even settings, as long as this syncing is written into the app. Apple's own apps use it, and though third-party apps haven't done much with it yet, they will. The first full third-party implementation of iCloud shipped just yesterday in iA Writer for iPad and Mac.

The service has more kinks in it than Dropbox, and it's not cross-platform. But this it's-just-there syncing paradigm will form the backbone of Apple's vision of computing, and that vision is infectious. The iPad and iPhone are selling in huge quantities, smashing Apple's own estimates. Even Macs are gaining marketshare. 2012 will be a big year for Apple, and iCloud will be the Web service that supports it.

If you use Apple devices and haven't set up iCloud, here's how to get started.

4. Kindle

We're used to thinking of the Kindle as a product, a device. But this year, Amazon made clear that Kindle is a service, not a product. Unlike Apple, for whom software is the service that sells profitable devices, Amazon will break even, or even take a loss, on each device in order to put its media and retail services in users' hands.

Kindles are just windows into Amazon's stores. You can save $30 on your device just by accepting ads as your screensaver. And this year, Amazon added the 7-inch, full-color Kindle Fire to the family, expanding the Kindle service to video, music, magazines, games and apps. It builds on the existing Amazon Prime video streaming service and its Cloud Drive for music.

The Kindle Fire also introduced Amazon Silk, a cloud-accelerated Web browser that uses browsing history to predictively pre-load Web pages for faster browsing on slow, handheld devices. Amazon has always known that load time can make or break a sale, so the Kindle service is designed to make buying, watching, reading and listening through Amazon as convenient as possible.

5. Evernote

You may not know it yet, but Evernote will be around for a while. In fact, its CEO wants it to be around for 100 years. It's another syncing service, but it's not like the others above. It works across platforms, unlike iCloud, and it works inside files, instead of agnostically pushing them around like Dropbox.

Evernote lets users create and store rich-text files, images, to-do lists, whatever kinds of little files they need, and it syncs to all their devices. It packs impressive technology like optical character recognition, letting users snap pictures of notes, receipts or business cards and capture the text. It offers handy services like web clipping and an Instapaper-like service for saving articles for later. And it offers standalone apps and browser extensions, letting users access it however best fits their workflow.

What's next for Evernote? If you have an idea, build it yourself. Evernote is building a 100-year platform to let its users capture anything and access it anywhere.

***Next Page:** Five services that changed the way we find and share stuff on the Web this year.*

6. Spotify

Spotify made a big leap this year, marrying Facebook's new Open Graph platform and becoming the way to share music with Facebook friends. Facebook's transformation this year brought us the concept of "frictionless sharing," in which users share their activity with their friends just by doing it, without having to click a 'Like' button.

Spotify has come to exemplify this model, sharing a soundtrack of its users' music habits with all their Facebook friends. Thanks to Facebook, Spotify's usage skyrocketed this year.

As Sean Parker told us at Web 2.0 this year, Spotify's social model works for the music industry, which has long sought a way to enable sharing while still generating some profits. Not every label has loved the changes, but Spotify will be fine; Facebook's base of 800 million users is too big to ignore. For some, Spotify's frictionless sharing is too much, but for now, it's redefining music on the social Web. Next year, we'll see how it holds up to Google Music on Google+.

7. Instapaper

Instapaper brought the concept of "content shifting" to the iPad, which is changing the way we read (it's on the iPhone, iPod Touch and the Web, too). Instapaper's basic function - saving articles for later - has inspired imitators, including the synced Reading List service from Apple itself and the new Evernote Clearly feature.

There's also Read It Later, a full-featured competitor that, unlike Instapaper, offers an Android client. But Read It Later's users shouldn't get too comfortable with the product as they know it; its big announcement this year was that it had taken on venture funding. That means big changes are coming. Instapaper, meanwhile, is a (mostly) one-man operation that is funded by the most basic business model: make a neat thing and let the people who like it pay for it. That means Instapaper is developed for the people who use it.

Instapaper shipped a major redesign in version 4.0 this year, making this app into a first-rate, iOS 5-ready place to gather all one's saved reading and just read it without distractions. Check out our interview with Instapaper creator Marco Arment for his views on Instapaper, iOS and the future of reading.

8. Flipboard

Flipboard is another app that's changing reading, but it's doing so by emulating and enhancing a reading experience we've had before: the magazine. The secret is that it's basically just a feed reader with a nice interface. People thought RSS was dead, but they were wrong. All it needed was the iPad and the Flipboard team.

Flipboard didn't ship a ton of new features this year, but two of them are quite significant. The first was full-page, magazine-style ads from luxury brands on major publishers' feeds. This signaled that publishers are happy with Flipboard's engaging format and will keep letting users pull their content. The second was Flipboard Accounts a single sign-in for Flipboard that means that Flipboard for iPhone is coming. It also means that multiple people can save their Flipboard setups on a single iPad.

9. Google Maps

Surprised to see Google Maps on a best-of-2011 list? Don't be. This was a huge year for Google Maps. It has long since set itself apart from the pack as the best way to navigate with the Web, and it made some major improvements this year.

Google Maps went high-tech. It got an integrated weather layer in the desktop version. It got 3D route views and zooming 3D Street View transitions. It got a drawing layer that lets developers build interactive, graphical applications on top of Google Maps, and it got voice-powered search for places in the desktop version of Chrome.

It went international, adding over 40 new country domains, graduating a big class of crowdsourced maps to the live map, and fully adopting Google Map Maker contributors as volunteer moderators.

Most importantly, Maps went local and social. It's now integrated into Google+, so users can share places and directions right into each other's streams. And it has continued turning the screws on Yelp by displaying Google Places recommendations right on the map. Finally, just today, Google Maps has begun to bring mobile maps inside buildings.

Google has put lots of work into making its Maps the best on the Web this year. And that's good, because...

10. Siri

It may not seem like it yet, but Apple has built its end-run around Google into iOS 5. While Siri is only available on the iPhone 4S for now, that's just a software restriction; Siri is a cloud-based service for which the device is but an interface. Google chairman Eric Schmidt admits that Siri is a threat. Siri is just a beta for now - and unlike Google, Apple doesn't use that label lightly - but it already looks like the next generation of search. In 2010, when asked why Apple bought the voice search startup, Steve Jobs replied, "They're not a search company. They're an AI company."

That's true; Siri is built on DARPA-backed research into artificial intelligence. It's not just onboard voice search, which iOS already had. It's a Web service, calling back to Apple's data center to process and understand each request. It uses Apple's cloud computing power to process the meaning of the query and find the most meaningful results. Apple isn't trying to do search as we know it. It's building a service that knows better than we do what we're searching for.

Siri is an "assistant." It takes dictations, it sets reminders and it looks things up for its user. If the answer is not on the iPhone or in Apple's cloud, it will search the Web as a last resort.

But tellingly, it uses Yelp for local business searches, one of Google's key businesses. For now, Apple still uses Google for its Maps app, but Apple bought a 3D mapping company this year. When Apple has its own maps, which mapping service do you think Siri will use when you ask it (her?) for directions?

Conclusion

One major theme of this year's top 10 was content. We aren't there yet, but these services are starting to figure out how to make Web content into a real economy. Another was syncing, which goes along with that. Now that we can have our stuff on all our devices simultaneously, it's worth more to us.

But most of all, the trend this year is toward integration. The winning services have started to think they've got the Web's problems figured out, and they're trying to build it all in.

That's our Top 10 Consumer Web Products of 2011. We'd love to hear your reactions or if we missed your favorite service. Sound off in the comments.

You enter a search term for whatever you want, which you can save as a "trap" that will automatically refresh with new content as it's published around the Web. Every time you log in, you'll see new stuff to read, and the suggestions get more personal every day. The Web app launches today at trap.it, but Trapit was developed as a platform, so this is only the first stage. "We expect to power sites and services across the Web," CEO and co-founder Gary Griffiths says.

When you search on Trapit, the first batch of stories might be pretty good, depending on your query. The interface prompts you to give five stories the thumbs-up or thumbs-down until it's finished personalizing. This isn't an up-vote or down-vote for popularity; it's just whether the article is what you're looking for or not. This is how the AI engine learns what you like and personalizes results for you. After that's done, the results are fine-tuned to your tastes, and the same trap on someone else's profile might look completely different.

Don't think of Trapit as a search tool. You can save traps to your profile, and as the engine finds new stories it thinks will interest you, it delivers them to your traps and gives you a notification. Trapit makes for a great homepage; every time you open your browser, you'll see new stories listed in your activity feed, which you can read now or save to your reading list for later.

While the trendy discovery engines these days are social, trawling your Facebook and Twitter connections and using those to approximate your interests, Trapit goes the other way. It uses only your query, your votes and its machine intelligence. "There's no concept of crowd-sourcing on here," Griffiths says. Trapit shows you featured traps by other users, which you can add as your own, but as soon as you do, they start personalizing for you specifically.

Trapit reminds me of Thoora, an app with a similar mission, but they work rather differently. Thoora's algorithms use certain signals, including popularity but also using smarter semantic data, to pull in content from millions of sources. Trapit scours fewer sources, but it uses different underlying technology with a grasp of natural language.

I've tried out both, and I don't know which is better. They both work much better than dumb popularity-powered aggregators, that's for sure. I can find endless amounts of relevant reading on either one.

Does a personalized news feed like this help you find good stuff to read? Try it out and tell us what you think. Go to trap.it and sign up for free and share your reactions and favorite traps in the comments.

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.

"We think this is really going to surprise and delight some people," says founder Ted Metcalfe. I think that's true. Even before the iPad launch, I found that Jux's in-your-face formats elicited some jarring, personal, intense content. I find browsing Jux refreshing, actually. Web content can be so sterile, polite, composed. Jux is like holding a megaphone up to the ear of Web 2.0 and shouting "BE INTERESTING!"

The iPad gestures take that further by making the experience more intuitive and exploratory, but the best part is that the content is actually exactly the same across platforms. "It's the exact same experience you'll have on the desktop going forward," Metcalfe says, "only totally touchable and that much better."

The six post types - BlockQuote, Article, Photo, Video, SlideShow, and CountDown - help Jux pre-define and format posts to suit their purposes. Some posts should focus on text, others should be a full image, half-page or whole-page, and so on. Metcalfe also says more post types are coming soon.

"It's totally HTML5 and Web-based," Metcalfe says. It supports all the videos, animations and fonts from the desktop version, and it handles rotation neatly (for the most part). There is no future Web without responsive design, and Jux is already there. The Boston Globe had to pay handsomely for this kind of responsive publishing. Jux is free, and it's no mere newspaper, either. No matter who you are or what you publish, Jux will handle that for you.

Visiting jux.com on the tablet takes you straight to the gallery screen. Every Jux has a tablet cover screen as an introduction that allows the publisher to put in a bio and add some links. Yeah, you know About.me and Flavors.me? That's just the cover of a Jux.

"It has that kind of quality of a portfolio or an album," Metcalfe says. And that's what a blog is in theory, right? It's chronology of your past work. Compare the experience of scrolling back through a typical blog to that of swiping through Jux portfolios in the gallery.

Inside, each Jux has a swipe-able table of contents. That's your Flipboard, Onswipe, Pressly, take your pick. Everyone realizes how important tablet publishing is. That's why so many services are climbing over themselves to take care of tablet formatting so publishers don't have to. But unlike those services, Jux really knows what content it's serving, because it's all made right inside Jux. From top to bottom, Jux knows how to show off the stuff people make with it.

The tablet gestures are mostly what you're used to, and there are subtle clues for the unusual ones. There's a diagonal swipe to move through SlideShow and CountDown posts, which is indicated by a small arrow in the corner. It also uses a pinch-out gesture to go back to the gallery.

One challenge for all tablet apps is teaching users any new gestures. Jux doesn't want reminders to get in the way of the experience. "We're assuming people know the basic iPad gestures," Metcalfe says. But it uses subtle cues when appropriate, and it also offers alternative navigation options like on-tap menus in less intuitive situations.

Life After Blogging

"It's tough making a Web app scream on the iPad," Metcalfe says. "We can always package this up as a dedicated app and get a little more speed out of it that way... but what we really want to do is be cross-platform, instant publishing, no download. We're here for the leading edge of individual content creators. We think it's the right overall technical strategy to be everywhere with a responsive design."

Jux is radical. Publishers who are established on other platforms would have to reinvent themselves to take advantage of it. But Metcalfe wants Jux to be for the next wave. "Whetting appetites by pushing the medium is our MO," he says.

Let me put it this way: Can your content management system publish any kind of post type you can dream of in a dynamic, Web-standard, responsive format with all the touch gestures a toddler wants it to have? Ours can't. Jux can.

Up Next: Mobile Jux

There's no posting or editing from the tablet yet, but Metcalfe says it's almost ready. That let me down, but Metcalfe was ready with a response that made it all better: The existing editing tools (which you can see in the previous post) will work on the tablet soon, but Jux is also building dedicated mobile apps for capturing and posting from anywhere.

Try it out. Visit jux.com on your iPad and browse the gallery.

What are some of the best responsive Web designs you've ever seen?

The Thoora app has nearly all of the features of the Web version. Users can create and explore topics that Thoora builds for them using machine learning and deep Web search. Articles discovered on the Thoora app can be easily shared on all the major social services. Whether it's just for fun or for serious research, Thoora digs deep to find you relevant content, and it feels great in the tablet form factor.

We covered Thoora's features earlier this week. It's a compelling alternative to the social search phenomenon of letting your friends' tastes substitute for real context. Thoora uses machine learning algorithms to help users build topics using keywords, popularity, and over 100 other quality signals. It's especially good at finding articles from small blogs deep within the Web, a shortcoming of typical search tools. Its attractive interface makes for a great user experience for both work and play applications, and the tablet form factor is a natural fit.

The UI is consistent with the Web version, but menus and controls have been moved to the periphery and organized in a familiar two-column tablet layout.

It's a great fit on a Motorola Xoom, and Carrie Shaw, Thoora's head of product, says that the Honeycomb-based app will be tested on the Kindle Fire as soon as possible. If it works as expected, they'll submit it to the Amazon Appstore. Thoora is also developing for iPad and phones, looking to ship those versions before the end of the year.

Grab the app from the Android Market, try it out and tell us what you think! If you create any cool topics, share them in the comments.

At some point, someone in the social graph has to discover something for the first time. With so much new content getting churned out all the time, a Web surfer looking for something original could use some algorithmic help. A new app called Thoora, which launched its public beta last week, uses the power of machine learning to help users uncover new content on topics that interest them.

Digging For Content

Thoora was founded in 2008, and it originally launched as a real-time news aggregator, which we covered back in 2009. But this new iteration is about much more than scanning the news. This is a toolkit for users to explore and research topics, and it learns more about them as its users sort out what matters to them. It is a social tool - users can share topics, and the Thoora site features highlights - but the purpose of the tool is to turn up the most relevant content on the topic, no matter how deeply it's buried in the Web.

"We like to say that we're at the intersection of aggregation, curation and search," says Carrie Shaw, head of product at Thoora. As far as users are concerned, that's a good description, but the real value of Thoora comes from the learning algorithms at work behind the scenes. As users create topics, discover content and clean up the results, the Thoora engine gets better at recommendations.

Shaw says the algorithm scours "28 million sources from the traditional media and the blogosphere... looking at over 100 signals to figure out the relevancy of the results and the order in which to present them." These include social signals, such as shares on Twitter, but it also looks for comments on the article itself, as well as other signs of article quality. If an article is swarming with ads or can be identified as the product of a content farm, that article's importance is diminished.

Creating A Topic

Currently, topics on Thoora stand alone, and topics with the same name by different users are not related. But Shaw says there are some advantages to that, because "different topics develop different angles over time," since topics can have different focuses and keywords. Users can browse existing topics through the Explore gallery, but the best way to see Thoora in action is to create a topic from scratch.

As soon as you choose a title, you can already see the engine at work. A suggested list of keywords appears on the right side, and the keywords adjust as you add more. Before creating the topic, you can either select one keyword as the main descriptor, or you can check "All keywords are equal." Finally, decide whether you want other members to be able to view and follow the topic (on by default), and then click "create topic."

After creating a topic, you can even pull in specific Twitter accounts or RSS feeds to put Thoora's engine to work on links that arrive there. It's a cool way to augment the firehose of content that the algorithm filters through. These can be seen in a tab called "Topic DNA," which shows all the user inputs going into the topic, including its followers, ratings, keywords and more.

The topic page displays a list of text articles with a range of sorting options. The article tab lists the title and a short excerpt along with the source, the date of publication, and the Thoora engine's popularity rating for it. Another tab surfaces related images.

Popularity is hardly the most important factor to the algorithm. In fact, it does a good job of identifying content on minor blogs due to other quality signals, whereas Google News would overlook a site without an established reputation.

If the topic you've created turns up weird or irrelevant results, that's an opportunity, not a problem. There's a trash can button to indicate to Thoora that a result isn't relevant, and if you delete it, the topic updates right away. You can also click the heart button to indicate to Thoora any articles you particularly liked. These new data points improve the algorithm for all users over time.

Sharing The Experience

Though Thoora is useful for personal research, it's also a shareable experience. Users can follow one another and see when new topics are posted. Topics and articles can be easily shared, and Thoora's Explore tab features popular topics, featured topics selected by Thoora editors, and a list of "Au-THOORA-ties" who have lots of followers and create good topics.

The Business of Discovery

Thoora is free, and Shaw says it will implement premium level of service in the coming months. The premium service will target content marketers, and Shaw says it will be "a very low cost." The main additional features will be analytics tools and integration with outside analytics software.

Whether you're a blogger or journalist, an academic, or you're just interested in something, a machine learning-powered tool like Thoora could be a powerful alternative to a purely social service.

If you give Thoora a try, share your cool topics with us in the comments.

The announcement comes two days before Amazon is expected to launch one of two Kindle tablets to compete with the iPad.

A new tablet also opens up channels for the 100,000 non-Prime titles Amazon already has in its queues.
We expect that the device will provide network channels to all sorts of content beyond movies and TV, and that it will run an Android system skinned to the Kindle theme. It should dramatically lower the entry cost for users of a tablet to around $250.

FOX titles available to Prime members will include contemporary movies such as, "Speed," "Mrs. Doubtfire," "Doctor Dolittle," "Last of the Mohicans," as well as classics like "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." FOX will also stream TV series including "24," "The X-Files," "NYPD Blue," "Arrested Development" and "The Wonder Years."

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.

For pages that look this rich, the editing tool is remarkably easy to use. It appears in a drop-down window above the page, and changes appear live underneath as you make your tweaks. It has filters and effects for photos, as well as some clip-art (read: mustaches), it offers a decent range of snazzy Web fonts, and it displays finished posts in a dynamically laid-out, Tumblr-like gallery. And as amazing as these full-screen pages look right on Jux, you can also embed them elsewhere. It handles quick posts, short films, and epic rants with equal grace.

It's a bit hard to navigate Jux, though. The URL structure for posts is not intuitive or easy to share and sharing anything requires you to use the internal navigation bar and share buttons. But getting to a user's gallery page is easy enough (I got jon.jux.com). Jux is such an immersive experience that getting around it doesn't feel like you're on the normal Web anymore. That's not necessarily a bad thing; there's no question that Jux is trying to create a new kind of content.

Dive into the featured Jux gallery to see what this app is capable of.

Jux has the backing of Mark Gorton, responsible for LimeWire, and CEO Ted Metcalfe is the guy who "eats, sleeps and showers with the product. When he's not meditating." To meet the rest of the team, check out their Jux post. Post? Gallery? SlideShow? This is such a new kind of content, it's hard to know what to call it. I asked Ted what it is, in his words:

"Wherever they create, bloggers work to find a unique voice and their readers discover, and ultimately cherish, that voice. This happens so much more instantly and palpably on Jux. When you visit an individual post or check out someone's whole Jux, you get saturated with signals - full-bleed images, color, and type ... big brief blockquotes and long thoughtful articles and slideshows ... all with zero distractions. A world takes shape.

"And this has implications for how you create as well. You're inspired to try more style and tones and a greater variety of genres to give shape to that world. Some of the creative options lend themselves to quick sharing, some to deep, evergreen content. People push it in different directions. And also create multiple Juxes around individual passions and Saturday-morning epiphanies. It's all much more porous, yet really real. Between tiny tweets and full-blown websites or blogs, lies a huge, under-explored range of stuff to make!"

It's not just about the content in itself for Metcalfe, either. "There are also brute content politics," he says. "The major media are trying to own the tablet - and, by implication, every screen - with superior publishing tools." It's worth noting here that Jux posts look pretty spectacular on a tablet. "Jux and its peers need to help individual creators flood these devices with the sort of beautiful, immersive, fullscreen experiences that people wanna kick back with," Metcalfe says. "We need to ditch our spiral-notebook-style blogging in favor of high def."

What do you think of Jux? Can you see a use for it in your work? Tell us in the comments.

Business Insider is reporting rumors from an analyst at research firm Jefferies that Apple has secret licensing deals in place to launch a video streaming service. Jefferies's Peter Misek reportedly said "...we believe Apple has unannounced deals with all/most of the studios/TV networks." If Misek is correct, Apple's play in the space is either a prelude to a deal with the networks for Hulu or a sign Apple was never really interested in the streaming service in the first place, planning all along to create its own streaming product perhaps to coincide with the release of iCloud. Either way, any premium streaming service from Apple will have huge ripple affects across the industry.

If Apple has deals with the networks and studios then the vetting process for buyers of Hulu should accelerate. If Apple or Amazon are not going to buy Hulu (based on their own streaming services and content licenses over the last month) then Google and Microsoft have to seriously consider their roles in the content ecosystem. Google has some premium content available to be viewed through the Android Market and YouTube, but there is no real premium-streaming product it can sell ads against. Microsoft has next to nothing in the premium content department outside of its Xbox streaming partnership with Netflix and Hulu.

If Apple does introduce a streaming service with the release of iCloud in the fall, the company can make a strong case that there is no reason not to buy an Apple TV box (or an actual "iTV, if such a thing ever exists). As we wrote the other day, Apple wants to take over your living room and there is consumer hunger for a true Internet TV, especially one that is emitted from Cupertino. Apple has $76 billion dollars to truly disrupt the television business, which used to be the networks' biggest fear. Yet, with lucrative streaming licenses now being sold (or at least pitched) to every big tech company, the cable box and television as it has been known for the last 20 years may finally become a thing of the past. It just took a bit of Apple to push it over the hill.

The dips in each region may not seem like a lot - usually only a percentage point or two - but Forrester analyst Jacqueline Anderson says there's still reason to be concerned.

Over the course of the past year, the Creator audience dropped from 24% to 23% in the U.S, went from 15% to 14% in the E.U., 44% to 41% in metropolitan China and 23% to 22% in Australia. The only country where content creation is on the rise is Japan, which saw an increase of two percentage points, going from 34% to 36%.

Fewer Creators Means Fewer Ideas

What this means, says Anderson, is that new content creation is now limited to existing Creators. "Creators are the elite group who power social content," she explains. "A lack of growth in this area translates into a lack of fresh ideas, content and perspectives."

Using YouTube as an example, she says that one third of U.S. consumers regularly watch user-generated videos on sites like YouTube, but only 10% say they've uploaded videos to public sites. It seems that interest in becoming a creator of content has plateaued.

Another group on the decline is Critics, the group responsible for posting ratings and reviews. In the U.S., Europe and metropolitan China, the percentage of Critics either remained flat or declined.

Meanwhile, the group known as Spectators, those that serve as the audience for Creators and Critics, is on the rise. In Japan, the number of Spectators grew by 6%, in Europe 4% and Australia 3%.

Some of these trends can be accounted for by the fact that social networking itself is on the rise. The group of new users joining social networks ("Joiners") has grown across the board, up from 51% to 59% in the U.S., going from 30% to 41% in the E.U., 26% to 29% in Japan, 50% to 61% in Australia and jumping from 32% to 50% in metropolitan China. These new users aren't likely to jump in head first with content creation, we would argue, but are more likely to sit back and watch. Whether that will change in the future as they get more comfortable with these new platforms is still unknown.

Way too often, I hear Web folks talk about "content" as some kind of undifferentiated commodity: "Yep, figger we're gonna need ten, maybe twelve kilos o' content for that page. You got a bulk discount?" Back a cargo truck up to the content silo, fill her up and you've got yourself a website.

How about you? When you hear "content", do you think of the lorem ipsum that fills in the space between the revenue-generating ads... or something else?

More Noise to Signal.

Ever since its inception, the Internet has blurred the boundaries between author and audience. Whether you're a blogger, a pillar of the printed word, a podcast coinnaseur or a developer dealing with the latest CMS, navigating the next step in Internet publishing can be a feat.

So, hit up these 10 events at SXSW Interactive 2010 to say goodbye to Gutenberg and hello to the interactive, multimedia, real-time, crowdsourced and community-funded future of online publishing.

ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income

Wanna ditch that desk job for the cubicle-less life of a professional blogger? What better way to kick off your SXSW Interactive 2010 than with a book reading from the editor and founder behind ProBlogger, Digital-Photography-School.com, and Twitip, three blogs that collectively reach over 3 million unique readers a month. Before you get into any panels predicting the death of this or that, let's start off with how you're going to start a blog and become rich, wealthy and wise.

The Revenge Of Editorials

If book readings aren't your bag, then how about a workshop on how to get to the bottom of all this content we create by the second?

"As the Internet has accelerated the creation of all types of content, it's become more and more difficult to sift through that content and find something of quality. We've tried it with machines and even mass consensus but the results are either wrong or lowest common denominator. The irony in all this is that we really need other humans to help us. The vast breadth of content on the Web only highlights what we've always relied upon: the valued opinion of others."

Critical Tits: Rights, Cameras and the Immediacy Age

What happens when every member of an audience suddenly becomes an author? Eyes from every angle and a battle over the right to create versus the right to privacy. Come watch as CNET News' Daniel Terdiman and Burning Man's Andie Grace surely take two separate sides on this issue.

"The EFF recently argued that Burning Man's not as open or nurturing as people think, and uses the DMCA to control photographers' rights. This caused a firestorm of controversy, forcing Burning Man to say its interests are protecting its trademark and attendees from being exploited by unscrupulous photographers. This panel will explore the tensions and the legal/community issues this controversy raised."

Funding Your Projects from the Crowd

"Crowdfunding inverts much that is wrong with traditional funding by breaking down the barrier between creators and audiences, and turning fundraising into a interactive experience. This panel brings together several perspectives from the world of crowdfunding to explain different approaches to raising money from the audience for bloggers, artists, podcasters, developers, filmmakers, musicians, and more."

Wikipedia Gets an Upgrade: Collaborative Video

We can't really get away with talking about the wild world of online publishing without mentioning one of the founding fathers of all that is interactive and communal - Wikipedia. But can Wikipedia really take the next step and go to video?

"Wikipedia is the most successful collaborative experiment in human history. Now it's getting a big upgrade: video. OGG Theora video paired with open source tech by Kaltura is evolving the wiki and prompting some big questions. Can wiki video work as well as wiki text? What does video mean to the Wikipedia community? How long until Grandma can hop in and improve the video entry on her favorite old crooner?"

Transmedia 2010: Are We There Yet?

While we're at it, not only have we left the printing press in the dust, but our standard categorization and assembly of media may be on the way out too. So, let's throw the baby out with the bathwater and get to talking transmedia. And you thought Wikipedia might be complicated.

"The promise and possibilities of transmedia storytelling have been on the horizon for several years. The concept involves immersive storytelling that utilizes multiple media outlets concurrently to enhance and advance the narrative. Some see this as a better way of totally involving an ever more fragmented and distracted audience. So join us for a "late breaking" assessment of the state of the movement. Has transmedia finally arrived?"

ReadWriteWeb's Party

Continuing along with the idea of traditional and less-traditional media, we'd love it if you stopped by our party on Sunday night! We're cohosting with NPR, PBS and a few others at KLRU's Legendary Austin City Limits Studio. We'll have live bands, Tex-Mex nosh, margaritas - the quintessential Austin experience. Free shuttles will be available at the Hilton.

How To Save Journalism

With Drew Curtis of Fark, Jeff Webber of USAToday, Kelly McBride of The Poynter Institute and Matthew Palevsky of The Huffington Post, find out how the Internet is going to save, not kill, jouarnalism.

"Much has been said about the death of journalism, but little has been offered in way of solutions. This panel will focus on solutions instead of problems, consensus viewpoints from both old and new media, and offer new insights into the operational structure of journalism and media for the 21st century."

A Brave New Future for Book Publishing

Bringing it back down to a realm we've almost forgotten, what about the life of the good old book? What's coming next? Will we break out of the binding?

"Call SXSW 2009's infamous ''New Think for Old Publishers'' (aka ''Geeks School New York'') a missed opportunity. How did book publishing become the last media industry to embrace digital and how will this change? New publishing models, strategy and a brave future for books and we who love them."

R.I.P. Content Management System

What better way to end your SXSW 2010 with a timely prediction of the death of CMS as we know it?

"The medium is the message. On the web, the medium is community. This shift has made legacy CMS products as outdated as scribes and printing presses. Open source technologies are disrupting this market and moving into mainstream enterprises. Join Drupal founder Dries Buytaert as he discusses how social publishing will bring content and community together."

Those are our SXSW Interaction recommendations for publishers of all stripes. If you've got suggestions or feedback, let us know in the comments! See you in Austin, folks!

Who Is Willing to Pay?

Forrester's Sarah Rotman Epps took a closer look at the demographic profile of those users who said that they would be willing to pay. Gender and marital status had no influence on a consumer's willingness to pay. Those who are willing to pay for magazine content are slightly younger that those who won't (43 years vs. 47). For newspaper content, however, there was no difference. Income, too, only makes a small difference. Those with a higher income are slightly more likely to pay for newspaper content than for magazines.

The report concludes that there is no consensus among consumers about how they want content delivered to them. The fact that 10% still prefer PDFs clearly shows that we are still in a transitional period. What is clear, though, is that consumers aren't very willing to pay for content online.

According to Forrester, publishers have two options: continue to offer a free, ad-supported product or offer consumers "a choice of multichannel subscriptions, single-channel subscriptions, and micropayments for premium product access."

As Rotman Epps also notes, there is a third solution: have a third party subsidize the cost of the content. This could be a device manufacturer who wants to offer exclusive content, for example.

A Slightly More Optimistic View

According to a report in the New York Times, about 48% of all Internet users in the US said that they would pay to read news online. This study by the Boston Consulting Group also looked at online news in general and found that a larger number of users was willing to pay. On average, though, these users were only willing to pay about $3.

The overall idea behind Fast Flip is interesting. Over time, the service learns what you like to read and will personalize its news suggestions for you. The execution, however, leaves much to be desired. Instead of a Google Reader-like text-based interface, Fast Flip displays a series of screenshots.

Usability?

On the desktop, you get a large picture of a page with the first part of an article without the ability to scroll down, and cut off sides where ads or links to other articles tend to be. Often, because a lot of magazines tend to feature very large images at the top of a page, all you get is a headline and an image. To actually read the article, you have to click on the screenshot.

On an iPhone or Android phone, the experience is even more annoying. Besides the problem that Fast Flip isn't extremely fast on a mobile device (images take longer to load than text, after all), the size of the screen guarantees that you can't actually read much in those screenshots besides the headline. To get a better view, you have to tap the screen and a menu will pop up that allows you to zoom into the picture or read the full article on the actual newspaper site or blog. As Rob Diana points out on the Regular Geek blog, that's a lot of clicking just to get from an unreadable thumbnail view to the actual content.

The other problem here is that Google is only working with a select number of content providers. At least for the time being, this is a closed off ecosystem.

Disappointing

Overall, Fast Flip just seems like a disappointing product. The cooperation with content producers is interesting, though we wonder if a single AdSense unit on the site will really make newspapers any money. Google Reader or personalized applications like my6sense on the iPhone or feedly on the desktop just seem far more interesting and usable than browsing through a series of screenshots.

Up until now, Dazzboard supported this to-and-fro between PC and mobile while also allowing you to upload to media sharing sites like Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube. Today, the company adds one more option: MySites, a web-based service offering an unlimited amount of cloud storage.

The first step to using Dazzboard is installing the software, which currently works only as a browser plugin (IE/Firefox) on Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7 PCs. The company has a Mac version in the works and will support Google Chrome once extensions come to that browser. A Facebook app and iGoogle gadget are also available.

From the web-based Dazzboard interface, you can easily move your files to and from the supported platforms and online services. You can browse, play, and organize your files which are organized into three categories: photos, music, and mobile.

For now, Dazzboard's focus is on the consumer market so for end users, the service is free. However, companies and brands wanting to use Dazzboard's API can do so if they're interested in sharing their content with website visitors or Facebook fans. Dazzboard simplifies the process of having that content pushed from web to mobile and handles the content's global mobile distribution for the brand. This service will be available for a fee and will help keep the consumer-level offering free.

...Now With Unlimited Cloud Storage!

With Dazzboard's new "Cloud Storage" option introduced today, you can upload files to MySites, a personalized homepage designed for file sharing. The MySites web service provides you with a custom URL (yourname.mysites.com), privacy control features, an RSS feed, and a multi-file upload option for sharing several files at once. After uploading your media, your page will feature the files and links to download and you also have the option to share the files using embed codes, Facebook, Twitter, social bookmarking services (Delicious, Digg, Google and Reddit), and even mobile QR codes.

Unbelievably, MySites, a free service, has no upload limit, no file size limit, no resizing of the original file, no download limits, no speed limits, no nag screens, and no watermarking. You can play your content right from MySites as the service provides players for the different file types hosted there (video, music, etc.) The company also plans to offer a Dropbox-style desktop client and API in the near future.

Dazzboard does not have an iPhone application at this time and may or may not ever build one. Since iTunes essentially does the same thing for iPhones and iPods, it would almost be foolhardy for Dazzboard to try and compete with Apple or any of the other thousands of apps available in the crowded market that is the iTunes App Store. Instead, Dazzboard's focus is on the other mobile devices outside of Apple's ecosystem. That's not a bad plan. Although sometimes it seems like everyone owns an iPhone these days, the reality is that worldwide, their are still plenty of other mobile phones to choose from. Now those device owners can enjoy media on their mobiles, too.