ReadWriteWeb

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.

I'll start with my disclaimer up front: These are my opinions you're about to read, not necessarily those of ReadWriteWeb. Now, maybe you've noticed this yourself already, but I actually don't read much "tech news" on the Web on a regular basis, besides what we publish here and what some friends and colleagues of mine produce elsewhere daily. There is news about technology and there is "tech news," and most of the time, they come from separate planets.

Many a colleague and some regular readers have read from me, or heard me say, the following: If a pro sports site like ESPN.com were to turn its attention to producing a technology news publication, it could improve the genre immensely. This week, the sports-minded folks at SB Nation are proving me right by providing a new and better platform for Joshua Topolsky and company to produce The Verge, the successor to Topolsky's version of Engadget.

A new study from BBC.com and Starcom MediaVest finds that tablets do wonders for news consumption. Tablet owners report reading more stories from more sources on more topics than non-tablet users, they enjoy the experience more, and they go straight to the source more often, rather than relying on aggregators.

But the study also found that the benefits of tablets extend beyond news. Subjects reported a range of improvements tablets brought to their lives, and many of them were unexpected. The study broke down tablet owners based on how long they've had tablets and found that all of the positive effects increased over time. Tablets aren't a fad; they're fundamentally changing the way people use the Web.

At one point, a print magazine about the online world was inevitable. (Remember Yahoo Internet Life?) But now, with the proliferation of smart phones, tablets and magazine apps like Flipboard, not so much. So the launch of The Social Media Monthly is a bit of a surprise. Even more so its distribution.

The first issue of the magazine is out today. Publisher Cool Blue Company announced its availability at the Barnes and Noble bookstore chain in the U.S., as well as distribution in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark.

Magazine publisher Condé Nast reports that The New Yorker's iPad version now has 100,000 readers, including about 20,000 people who have subscribed for $59.99 per year. In addition, "several thousand" people buy single weekly issues for $4.99.

The New Yorker's success on the iPad makes sense on multiple levels. Its rich illustrations and long-form content fit both the iPad's laid-back, hands-on use case and its target audience. But the app also fits into a successful and growing category of reading apps that clear out all the clutter and just focus on the reading. As publishers of other high-profile magazine apps see interest waning, a successful genre of iPad magazine may finally be emerging.

CoverCake, a service that tracks online conversations about books, is launching a new Web-based dashboard app tomorrow, turning its vast library of data into an analytics tool for publishers, authors and fans alike. The new analytics features will enable publishers and authors to measure the impact of promotion, publicity and social media campaigns by seeing the conversations they generate.

If "lean startups" these days are supposed to release a minimum viable product, get reactions from initial customers, and then rapidly iterate - might not a book about startups work the same way? Every Book is a Startup is Todd Sattersten's new book, published by O'Reilly, about the changing publishing industry. You can buy the first two chapters of the eBook today for $4.99 and get subsequent chapters as free updates as they are written. But if you wait for the full book to be completed and published in paper, the price will be $25.

It's a fascinating experiment in eating your own dog food but it's not without historical precedent. Many novels throughout time were sold by subscription (Dickens, for example) and Samuel Johnson once took nine years to write the Western world's first authoritative printed dictionary. It was supported by subscription along the way and the end product weighed 20 pounds. That project was initiated by the publishing industry in response to massive disruption caused by the proliferation of printed materials and a need for a reference book defining common words. Perhaps this period of technological disruption will be well suited for another experiment in a similar format.

Author J.K. Rowling unveiled the plans behind the mysterious Pottermore website this morning, and fans that were hoping for a new installment in the beloved Harry Potter series or for a wizarding MMORG may be disappointed. But for those who've been waiting to read the novels on their e-readers, good news: Pottermore will involve, in part, the release for the very first time of the Harry Potter series in a digital format.

In what's an uncommon occurrence, Rowling retained all the rights to digital copies of her books. And until now, she had not struck any deals with publishers or distributors to make the series available digitally. All that will change when Pottermore officially launches this fall.

Publishers are looking to get in on the magazine-layout aggregation app game, swimming in the waters currently inhabited by tablet apps like Flipboard, Zite, and News.me. Pressjack, a publishing tool created by former publishers, is looking to create the same look and feel of those applications in your browser.

The idea is simple - take RSS and social feeds and turn them in to a branded, slick user interface. Pressjack is an attempt to make it easy and intuitive to publish on the Web with existing tools and, for once, not let the Silicon Valley startups eat their lunch.

When the Association of American Publishers (AAP) released its sales figures for the month of February, the headlines were easy to compose: e-books have surpassed print in all trade categories.

E-books have become the format-of-choice, these figures suggest. In January, the AAP said that e-book sales were up 116% year-over-year, and for the month of February that growth accelerated even further. February 2011 sales were up 202.3% from the same time last year.