Harper's Index, the most thought provoking fun you'll find on one printed page, is turning 25 years old. Harper's Magazine, launched in 1850, is the 2nd longest continuously published magazine in the United States (behind Scientific American) but the Index is the first page that many readers skip to in each issue. To celebrate the Index's anniversary, Harper's has put the full index of biting trivia one-liners up on its website for searching and reposting on Twitter. Welcome to the 21st century Harper's Index, may you bring us as much joy and reflection in the future as you always have in the past.

New York Times City Room editor Patrick LaForge noted the new page's availability this afternoon and the official Harper's Twitter account announced a "Twitter sneak preview" yesterday. Search results are displayed just like a topically organized installment of the traditional Index, but with sources displayed and a link to Tweet each fact when you hover over one with your mouse. It's quite nice.

This is a great way to introduce the print publication to a new generation of readers. We hope it will help this institution continue to thrive into the next era of media.

PC Magazine has been publishing a digital edition since 2002, but at least in its current version, this digital edition only imitates the print version in its layout, which is definitely not the easiest and most convenient way to read text. Also, the problem for print magazines is not the fact that they are physical objects, but simply the fact that a publication which only appears once a month will always lag behind its online competition, especially in a fast moving business like technology news.

A number of publishers have been experimenting with digital editions similar to PC Magazine's. The New York Times, for example, has its Times Reader application, which allows offline access to the paper. However, in a world where online access is becoming ubiquitous, these products are at best bridges to a pure online experience.

PC Magazine, of course, already has a strong online presence and a number of very interesting blogs and online video shows. The value of PC Magazine often wasn't in its news content anyway, but in its reviews - all of which are available online, without the need to subscribe to a digital edition of the magazine.

Would You Subscribe to a Digital Edition?

While we are glad to see that a quality publication like PC Magazine is taking steps to secure its future, it is not clear to us why PC Magazine would put time and effort into producing a digital edition of its magazine instead of just focusing on the online experience.

German publisher Bertelsmann just released a printed, 992 page version of the German Wikipedia. It will sell for 19.95 Euros, of which 1 Euro will go to the Wikimedia Foundation.

Abbreviated

Of course, the printed version could not include every keyword in the online version of the German Wikipedia, so the publishers restricted themselves to about 50.000 keywords and 1000 illustrations. Overall, the printed version includes about 20.000 articles, which were abbreviated by the editors.

It's important to note that this printed version is not an encyclopedia, but instead a dictionary that is based on the 20.000 most read articles in the German Wikipedia. Most entries are only a few words long. If you wonder about what this book looks like, Google Books already includes a preview of the text and, in keeping with the GPL license, the publisher has made the text available for download.

Why?

The real question, however, is why anybody would want to buy a printed and abbreviated version of Wikipedia. After all, you lose all of the advantages of full-text search and the ability to edit articles in this printed text.

It is worth noting, too, that this is not the first time the German Wikipedia has been published. German publisher Zenodot tried to market a Wikipedia-based encyclopedia in 2005, but the project was cut short because there was simply no demand for it.

I loved that site and am very sad to see it go. The service was a lot of fun to use. Given how recently the company has received substantial media attention and how loyal its small group of users was, this was a real surprise. Can high-end websites for thinking people ramp up and monetize quickly? This news makes you wonder.

You've reached this page because, at the moment, Brijit is out of money and can no longer afford to bring you the world in 100 words. We're working hard to find a way forward for our service and hope to relaunch in the not-too-distant future. Thanks to all our loyal readers and writers. And to our Brijit writers: payments in full for all abstracts published through May 15 will be made next week.

As you can see from the Compete graph below, traffic was trending up at Brijit after an initial media spike. The company has a really compelling system of "assignments" for review writers and the end result is a great crib-sheet for anyone headed to the periodicals section of a local bookstore on the weekend.

Brijit content is still available on the website here. You can read our previous coverage here. A great article about Brijit in the Washington Post is here. The Post reported in October that the company had raised $1 million in funding. Did it already burn through that, $5 at a time, or has something else happened?

I really hope that this isn't another signal that only lowest-common denominator content is able to monetize and scale online these days. It's hard not to think that Brijit's management must have drastically miscalculated somewhere. A million dollars aint what it used to be, though. Either way, the web will be a less wonderful place if Brijit goes belly up for good.

Some background: Tabblo is a custom printing site that HP acquired in March 2007. In our meeting, Antonio described Tabblo to me as "Flickr meets blogger on steroids". Using Tabblo, you can mashup photos and add text, to create a kind of collage - which you then have the option to print out as a poster, book, card, etc. The collage is also available online, where other Tabblo users can comment on it. There are a lot of other features too, such as advertising options and widget-like tools. At the heart of Tabblo is its template engine, which allows users to output their creative photo collages both online and as printed materials. Here's a good example of a Tabblo collage, from someone's birthday party. Here's another example, via Flickr:

The tale of how Tabblo got acquired is interesting in itself - and a great example of the process a startup might take before being acquired by a big company. Tabblo got its funding in June 2005, went into alpha March 2006, then beta at the end of May 2006, finally hitting 1.0 in July 2006. It was acquired less than a year later. So from funding to acquisition, less than 2 years. But importantly it was a useful web app with a healthy user base. Om Malik summed it up well at the time of acquisition, noting that Tabblo had "made a tool that incorporated the best of social web and built a layer of usefulness on top of that. And focused their product on mainstream users."

So in summary, Tabblo was a great web 2.0 product that made the step up to big company app. In doing so, it seems to have inspired Print 2.0 inside of HP. Well, there is probably much more to the Print 2.0 conception, but Tabblo is what makes the concept make sense and come alive. Sometimes big companies come up with lots of PR bluster and crazy concepts (and nowadays there's usually a "2.0" in the PR), but at the heart of it there has to be something that connects with consumers. Tabblo is that thing, with HP's Print 2.0 story.

Printing Becomes a Service Too

HP acquired Tabblo with the aim of making printing from the Web easier. For example, webpages are sometimes difficult to print (R/WW is guilty on that count!). In terms of the big picture, Antonio explained to me that the print business is huge, but that HP is starting to think in terms of digital devices now - rather than the old model of [paper] pages. So in terms of products, HP's Print 2.0 strategy is about delivering products and services such as the Tabblo Print Toolkit - which enables publishers to provide template-based PDFs of their webpages for easy printing.

HP also wants to get into the on-demand printing business, where it will face competition from the likes of Amazon.com and Lulu.com. Antonio told me that the vision is for a self-serving site to create books. However he said that there are practical issues holding this up, such as DRM.

There are also partnership deals. At Web 2.0 Summit HP announce that its Print 2.0 technology has been integrated into Flickr, allowing Flickr users to easily print their photos. HP did a deal too with Disney, allowing users to combine professional Disney content with their own personal content - and print it out. The Graffiti Application for Facebook, where users can draw on their friends profiles, was also print-enabled by Tabblo.

Ultimately HP wants to make printing a service - I suppose much like Microsoft wants to make its software into services. HP wants to make printing more personal and social; which brings us back to Tabblo's legacy. It did precisely that, make printing personal and social. But HP wants to do it on a much larger scale. This is why big companies build startups of course!

What do you think of HP's Print 2.0? Does it make more sense now that you know the Tabblo story?