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.

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.

The majority of tablet owners agree that these new devices "offer more than just portability and convenience," and that sentiment only increases over time. Roughly the same proportions use the tablet at home more than they anticipated. Only 48% of people who have owned a tablet for less than six months use it more than they expected to, but that proportion increases to 57% by the end of the first year.

It takes some time for people to get used to their tablet. Only 44% find that tablets are a seamless part of their lives in the first six months. But by the time they've owned a tablet for a year or more, nearly 70% feel that it's an integral part of their routine.

Another interesting finding was that tablet owners report increased efficiency more than they do "fun," which runs counter to the popular perception of tablets as unserious devices meant for play. While 62% reported that tablets let them do things more efficiently, 51% said their tablets let them have more fun. And 67% of the subjects said they were "excited to see what tablets become capable of," so the future of tablet computing looks bright from consumers' standpoint.

Tablets Whet News Consumers' Appetites

As far as the content consumed on tablets, the study concentrated on news, a media category that has a ways to go to recover from the disruptions of the digital age. It found that 78% of tablet owners follow more news stories, in terms of both volume and variety, than they did before.

Respondents reported that tablets substantially improved many aspects of the news experience. 81% reported that "tablets make following the news more interesting and enjoyable," and 78% felt that "tablets substantially improve the news experience overall."

Tablets Bring Immersion and Control

One of the strongest signals of what tablet owners like about the experience is the customization and control it offers. 85% of tablet owners find it easier to customize and interact with tablet-specific content.

Tablets Can Make Advertising Work

Control over the experience played into subjects' preferences for news content itself, but it even factored into the way they felt about advertising, that crucial element of the news business.

"The advertisements on my laptop just drive me nuts," says Mindy, one of the subjects. "On the tablet, I didn't have that experience."

"Maybe I wouldn't mind the ads so much if... it's leading to something relevant to me," adds Lauren, another subject, "but if there's something fun that I can do with an ad to personalize it and make it really fit [for] me, then it's something I might click on, and I might send it to my friends."

This video interview with Mindy and Lauren shows an example of an AdJitsu 3D mobile ad, which we reported on last week:

Methodology

The study was conducted by Latitude with a three-phase methodology:

The first phase consisted of exploratory, qualitative phone interviews with tablet owners and news consumers, looking for insights into the role of tablets in users' lives to direct the rest of the study.

Phase two involved a 20-minute online survey with n=1099 news consumers between the ages of 18 and 54, 88% of whom were current tablet owners. This phase also used interactive elements to capture reactions to ad campaigns and elicit insights about how to make tablets work best for consumers.

The final phase was a week-long immersion trial in which heavy tablet owners were deprived of their devices, and non-tablet owners were immersed in tablet content. These trials were followed by in-depth interviews in which subjects articulated the benefits and drawbacks of their experiences.

What do you think? Have tablets changed the way you browse? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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.

The publication is also available as a "standalone flash digital e-zine" and an iTunes app.

The debut issue's cover was designed by Yiying Lu, known for her design of Twitter's fail whale.

Robert Fine, the founder of Cool Blue, says advance orders of the second issue are up 20% over the launch issue. Single issues are on sale for $4.99 for a print copy and $2.99 for the digital version. A year's subscription runs $29.99 and comes with digital access. There is no information on how many copies of the first issue have sold.

It seems that, after a long period of expansion, with many products offered for free, we have now entered a period of contraction. Earlier today we wrote about the movement away from free online television content and maybe this magazine's approach is an expression of that same trend.

The articles in the first issue do not seem particularly compelling to me. (See graphic below.) But you may feel differently. Let us know in the comments.

More generally, I personally I love the printed page. But I'm unsure of its utility when it comes to the topic of social media. What do you think? Is there a reason for a print magazine on an essentially paperless topic?

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.

The magazine is already known for its sparse, text-focused design, and the iPad version retains the magazine's classic aesthetic. The success of distraction-free reading apps like Instapaper, which was included in Apple's iPad Hall of Fame for its dominance in the news category, suggests that this kind of reading experience is what iPad users want. Then again, it could just be that the New Yorker and the iPad happen to appeal to the same audience.

By contrast, Wired, which was Condé Nast's early entry into the native iPad market, saw an initial burst of enthusiasm, but its sales declined markedly after that. Wired's layout is more dynamic and multimedia, and the downloads are bulky, which could discourage sustained interest.

The New York Post's iPad app, with its loud, bold layout, has bullied its way to the top of the heap, edging out even Instapaper as a top-grossing news app, but it did so by blocking its Web content explicitly from the iPad's browser, even though it's available on the desktop and other devices. This unconventional strategy might work for the Post, but it works against users of the Web.

Meanwhile, Condé Nast has not bet its digital business exclusively on native apps. Last week, it became the first advertising partner on Flipboard, the iPad reading app that pulls in content from any number of user-selected feeds to create a magazine-like experience. The New Yorker's Flipboard edition, which offers the same free content as the New Yorker's website, is the first Flipboard feed to display ads. But other than these interspersed ads, the Flipboard reading experience is clean and quiet.

The newest crop of magazine-like apps, such as The Atlantic's new standalone edition and AOL's personalized AOL Editions, look much more like Flipboard than The Daily. With the New Yorker and other iPad reading apps posting some positive signs, competition for points of sale heating up, and overall Web traffic from tablets growing strongly, the market for magazine-style reading in digital formats could be starting to gel.

This makes CoverCake's data set valuable to anyone interested in the market for books. Boopsie, a mobile book discovery app for libraries, has already integrated CoverCake's data using its API. The new analytics tools now allow users to find or track books using CoverCake's own website.

We've been covering some experiments in publishing lately, and Web technology has enabled rapid innovation in this quintessential pre-Web industry. CoverCake's interface and data science could help bring more precision to a new way of publishing.

The company's business focus, says Business Development Director Todd Gibson, is "primarily on publishers and authors," who derive the most direct benefits from this intelligence. The only way for the rapidly shifting industry to get smarter, he says, "is for them to figure out what people really like, outside of sales figures." The byproduct of that also happens to be an interesting book discovery tool for consumers.

The consumer appeal of these analytics tools is not as obvious as it is for a social service like Goodreads, which helps users discover new books through recommendations from their own social networks, as well as some original content like book lists and interviews. CoverCake lets readers see what books are popular now, as well as who's talking about them, but it's up to the user to filter the data to find what he or she is looking for. But for authors and publishers, CoverCake has an advantage over other enterprise analytics tools, because it's focused on the market that matters to them. Its dataset has limitations, but those can be an asset.

CoverCake's book discovery capabilities can be accessed through its free iOS app. The Android app offers more features, letting users filter by genre and see what books are trending in online conversations. Future versions will include analytics capabilities. The company is also working on an algorithm to separate out conversations about different editions and formats, enabling users to distinguish between print and e-books, for example.

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.

Another Way to Do It

When lean startup guru Eric Ries went to market this month with his new book The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses, he decided to use a traditional print publishing strategy (with Crown Business as publisher), in order to gain maximum promotional support and distribution.

Ries used his widely-read blog and social media presence to build a community of supporters before any part of the book was available - then asked that the members of that community pre-order the book as soon as that was possible on Amazon. The book itself won't be available for two more months - but it's hot on the Amazon charts already. It hit #7 in the best-seller ranks just hours after the pre-order call to action was issued on Ries's blog.

Is that a case of straddling the future and the past? Which kind of strategy do you think will work best in the future, Ries's or Sattersten's?
"This project is much more than just a typical ebook," writes O'Reilly's Joe Wikert. "It's actually a collection of publishing experiments packaged as an ebook."

"The primary case I am making is that we need to bring entrepreneurship back to book publishing," Sattersten the author explains. "We need more experiments. We need to learn from the world of startups."

Sattersen was interviewed yesterday by Jenn Webb on O'Reilly Radar. "Your personal definition for a 'book' can limit your opportunities as well," he said. "If you limit that definition to, say, 224 pages of paper in a 6-inch-by-9-inch trim size, you just made your world a pretty small one."

The experiment speaks to the future but clearly to the past as well, in several ways. "This was the dream of every would-be writer/publisher in the 80s and 90s," says Curt Hopkins, ReadWriteWeb's most experienced and diverse writer on staff, "but the tech for it didn't exist."

The 18th century's Samuel Johnson was well-known and patronized by a handful of that time's most powerful media interests. "Now, a would-be publisher could run a Kickstarter campaign and lay funnels out to a dozen social media properties," says Hopkins. "It still probably wouldn't work, but there is a chance it would, and the whole thing would take an afternoon to completely set up."

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.

Self-Publishing's Defining Moment

The books will be available exclusively through the Pottermore site, meaning that Rowling is self-e-publishing the novels. While self-publishing is, of course, nothing new, digital publishing and digital readership has helped self-publishing become more popular and, for authors, more lucrative. As we reported earlier this week, Amazon recently announced that self-published author John Locke had joined its "Kindle Million Club" after selling over one million copies of his e-books on the Kindle platform.

But Rowling's decision here isn't just another mark of legitimacy for self-publishing, nor is it simply yet another blow to the traditional publishing industry - although no doubt, both of those are true. Rowling's announcement has several other ramifications here for the publishing industry.

DRM-Free Content

Digital rights management (DRM) technology is often placed on digital content, so the argument goes, to help prevent piracy. And indeed, the Harry Potter series may already be among the most pirated books in history, no doubt because of fans' desire to read the books in a digital format. But rather than viewing that desire with suspicion about sharing, Rowling is trusting they'll do the right thing. The Harry Potter e-books will reportedly be DRM-free, although they will be digitally watermarked with purchasers' information.

Wired calls this the publishing industry's "Radiohead moment" and likens this to the band's release of its albums on its own site. "The crucial parallel between Radiohead and Rowling is the fact that they both put their faith in the fans rather than any intermediary. For Radiohead, this meant self-releasing their album In Rainbows after the end of their contract with EMI with an honesty-box pricing strategy."

E-Book Standards

DRM-free content also means that consumers won't be locked in to one particular format. As it currently stands, DRM is one mechanism that prevents users from sharing e-books; but it also means that Kindle owners can't read Nook content, and Nook owners can't load their iBooks onto their devices. But DRM is only part of the problem here; file formats are another. Rowling says that the books will be made available for all formats - to Kindle, iPad, Nook owners alike.

It's not yet clear how that will be accomplished, but the most obvious way to do that would be via ePUB, the open e-book standard. However, Kindle does not currently support ePUB. But as paidContent's Laura Hazard Owen posits, "if any author could get Amazon to change its policy, it's J. K. Rowling."

There have been rumors recently that the Kindle will begin supporting ePUB, and that may come as part of Amazon's new library lending program this summer.

(Another) Tipping Point for E-Books

The tipping point for e-books could have been when Amazon announced that Kindle versions were outselling print bestsellers two-to-one or when it said that e-books were outselling all print copies. The tipping point could have been when the company announced that a self-published author had managed to sell one million copies of his e-books.

But it seems likely that with the excitement and passion that Harry Potter fans have for anything associated with the series, that the release of the digital Pottermore will unleash yet another milestone in what is a quickly changing landscape for publishing.

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.

The outcome, in theory, should be a Flipboard-like experience. This is both forward thinking and backward thinking. Pressjack was created by Trinity Innovations, a company founded by former publishers in 2004.

"As ex-publishers, we understanding that publishers already had the skills in-house, all they needed was a software solution that automated the conversion of content into a digital magazine format," the company says on its site."

The publishing industry, with a few exceptions like the New York Times, has been miles behind in the thought race to create new and interesting ways to consume content on the Web. Yet, Pressjack is not exactly unique nor is it the only way to create browser-based magazines. InMag has offered the same type of functionality for a while and Good Noows makes an decent-looking browser aggregation interface.

The hope for something like Pressjack is that it does not become a static interface in the browser. People are still having nightmares of the late 1990s and early 2000s when a lot of publishers tried to put their content on the Web via a PDF magazine that was essentially a scanned version of the print product. Tools like RSS and Twitter feeds change how content can be curated and presented.

Trinity Innovations' vision is an interesting one. Instead of a going to a news site and navigating through the classic browser interface, the Web could be comprised of more attractive online magazines that are sleeker, more intuitive and easier to sell ads against.

Where does Pressjack aim to take content? Into the future or back 10 years?

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.

Of course, a trade paperback has always been a fairly mobile "device" on its own accord. But it's size and weigh hasn't saved it from falling sales. E-books became the number one format in all categories of trade publishing in February, surpassing adult hardcover, adult paperback, adult mass market, children's and young adult hardcover and children's and young adult paperback.

Is This a Post-Holiday Sales Trend or Something Longer Lasting?

The AAP suggests that this surge is a continuation of post-holiday sales, as people buy e-books to load onto the e-readers they received as gifts. Whether or not this trend will continue long after the novelty of new tech toys wears off remains to be seen.

What's also worth watching: not simply the sales of new titles, but the renewed consumer interest in old titles, backlisted books that have been in print for over a year but that people want to buy, again, to load onto their new e-readers.
While that excitement to buy books might sound like good news for the publishing industry, the buzz over e-books hasn't stopped sales overall from falling. For the year-to-date, sales of e-books have grown by almost 170% to $164 million. But the sale of print books, which is still a far larger portion of overall publishing revenue, has fallen by almost 25% to $442 million.

Tom Allen, the CEO of AAP, puts a positive spin on the news: "people love books." Perhaps.

And perhaps e-readers will spur a new passion for reading (and buying). But for many readers, it may be less that we're buying more books, but that we're buying books in a new format, taking away from the revenue from the sale of $25 hardcovers that have long floated the industry and now purchasing our books in $10 digital formats. That means the publishing industry has to sell a lot more e-books to make up that difference.

In advance of National Poetry Month, Publishers Weekly has published an essay by Craig Morgan Teicher on a significant obstacle in the move toward e-publishing. Well, maybe it's not significant. It's poetry.

Poetry is the red-headed step-child of publishing, always last in the queue for its bowl of gruel. But finally, it's gruel-time. The main poetry publishers, including Graywolf, Copper Canyon, BOA, Coffee House and Wesleyan "will make at least some of their books available as e-books by the fall." But there's a problem.

But whether it's George Herbert, Wu Tsao or David Berman a poet is crippled without the ability to create the script of a poem in the way he or she hears it in the imagination. To crib a stunt from PW, take a look at these two versions of a part of Williams's, "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower."

"My heart rouses thinking to bring you news of something that concerns you and concerns many men. Look at what passes for the new. You will not find it there but in despised poems. It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there."

Now this one.

Because of the relative lack of popularity, and profitability, of poetry in the modern age, and the difficult hand-coding a format like EPUB needs (even then it seems to be more at the whim of a transcorporated entity than the most metaphysical verse), most poetry has yet to see the inside of an e-book and most won't, at least no time soon. Publishers Weekly outlines a few possible solutions. I have a couple of my own, but we'll get to that.

Solutions

Ampersand, a free smartphone and iPad app from Bookmobile, creates beautiful text. In PDF, wrapped in DRM. So, is it really an e-book? Seems to me that it's a document you can read on a smartphone or tablet. Some publishers are getting behind this tech. But I wonder if people who are excited about the benefits of the e-book format, as outlined by our own dear leader, Richard, will be that excited about something that is so static. At least it preserves the art of the book's design. Kind of. It will be available at the Bookmobile store this coming summer.

Copper Canyon has received a $100,000 grant from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation to develop e-book formats like EPUB to a point where they will organically accept the specific needs of poetry.

Google Books has scanned the living daylights out of everything they can get their hands on. Not everyone has been thrilled by the prospect. Still, Google is a screaming metal juggernaut filled with brainiacs who are not afraid of weird ideas. Although nothing is cooking in the poetry e-book area so far as I know (how far down on someone's 20% would that project be?), you never can tell.

And now for something completely different

As a published (though not nearly published enough) poet, I have a vested interest in seeing my poems, and that of others, out. The more poetry the better. Not only is it what I value, and what I personally dig, but it will benefit me as a poet. But poetry e-books are so far down the list of what poets and publishers should be spending their time on I can hardly express it.

A group of poetic ne'er-do-wells I've belonged to for years, the Big Time Poetry Theatre, spent years giving readings, off-book, everywhere from street corners to bars to theaters. One time in particular I remember putting up a poster (ask your parents) for a big show we were putting on full of rock bands, lecturers, dancers and poets, when a guy came up and said, "I remember you guys. After I heard you do 'Song of Myself' I went out and bought a recording of James Earl Jones reading 'Leaves of Grass.'"

Why'd he buy an audio book? Because if a poem doesn't leave you breathless, it's a diary entry.

The technology is already there, in spades, to publish poetry in audio files of different sorts. Poetry is, in the end, the deformation of air in patterns. It should be out loud. There's nothing wrong with a book of poetry, but if it can't live in the air it's a hothouse flower. We've got enough of those.

If you're not familiar with recorded poetry, the Internet is rife with options.

• Salon's got a rather generous poetry audio section, featuring everyone from Dylan Thomas to ee cummings to Wanda Phipps to Billy Childish to Langston Hughes.
• Poetry Foundation features a "poem of the day" and other audio programs that feature recited poetry spanning the range from Weldon Kees to Ben Johnson to Ho Xuan Huong.
• Audible's poetry section has Derek Jacobi reading English poetry, Richard Burton reading Donne, Coleridge and (blarf) Hardy and the poetry of Anne Sexton.

Here's the important thing. Until people realize you can rock your obscure object of desire back on his or her heels and straight into the sack by memorizing and reciting poems, no amount of technology will make a bit of difference.

But once they do, oh my...

Reading photo by Rhymes | Deux Magots photo by Chris Pomeroy | Asphodel screen from Poets.org

Google has just introduced Google One Pass, a service that will let publishers set their own prices and terms for their online content.

Rather than the 30% cut that Apple will take with its new subscription plan, it appears as though Google is simply asking for the normal service charges associated with billing via Google Checkout (a 2% fee).

One Pass can be used for both Web and mobile content. So for readers, purchases via a One Pass publisher will give them the "buy once, read anywhere" - access to the material on all their devices via a single sign-on. (The devil is in the details, of course, as Google does say users can "access content on connected, browser-enabled devices and from mobile apps where the mobile OS terms permit publishers to access the web via the app for Google One Pass transaction or authentication services. Will that include iOS?)

Currently Google One Pass will be available for publishers in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S.

The Amsterdam-based IFMSA represents 1.2 million medical students from 97 countries and provides a substantive boost to open access efforts. Open access is the belief that scholarly research should be widely available instead of being siloed in fantastically expensive, gated journals and otherwise guarded.

"We believe that Open Access to research will positively benefit all aspects of health care; it will improve the knowledge of health care workers, researchers and medical students by making crucial information easy to access. Open Access will also improve and democratize medical education by expanding access to research articles so crucial to students' training, strengthening the IFMSA vision of equity for medical students worldwide."

The Right to Research Coalition is "an international alliance of undergraduate and graduate student organizations that promotes a more open scholarly publishing system through advocacy and education." With the addition of the IFSMA it now represents seven million students globally.

Read more ReadWriteWeb coverage of education.

In other news, last week blog publishing software company Six Apart was acquired and is being folded into a new social media advertising company called SAY Media. The world of media is changing. These days, 'publishing' content is merely the first step for a media business.

Whenever I have to state my job title - for example on airport arrival and departure forms - I put down "Web Publisher." I'd always assumed that was what I am, since I am the publisher of this website ReadWriteWeb. A friend of mine challenged this definition recently, claiming that according to the Oxford dictionary I was not in fact a publisher. Puzzled, I went to the online version of the Oxford dictionary and looked up the word publish. And sure enough, the two main definitions are limited to the print view of publishing:

"prepare and issue (a book, journal, or piece of music) for public sale"

"print (something) in a book or journal so as to make it generally known"

The origin of the term seems to be more open-ended and could be read as including online works:

"Middle English (in the sense 'make generally known'): from the stem of Old French puplier, from Latin publicare 'make public', from publicus."

I maintain that a professional blog is a form of publishing, so I'd argue that Oxford Dictionary's definition is out-of-date (feel free to debate me in the comments about that). Regardless, MPA's decision to drop 'publishers' from its name reflects the changing state of media in the Web era.

MPA says on its homepage that its rebranding "reflects the multi-platform nature of magazine content." MPA has a new logo to reflect this change, which "replaces [the] classic turning page symbol with two rectangular frames that appear horizontally and vertically around the letters M-P-A, evoking the multiple ways through which magazine media are being experienced and enjoyed today." You can view an animation of that explanation here.

SAY Media: VideoEgg + SixApart

Interestingly, the creator of the publishing platform that we use at ReadWriteWeb - Movable Type - has also recently moved away from being a publishing software company. Six Apart, the company which built Movable Type - was acquired last week by online advertising network VideoEgg. A new combined company called SAY Media is the result. The new entity is calling itself a "modern media company" and is very focused on social media and advertising.

Everyone is a Publisher, Er... Modern Media Creator

You could say that everyone is a publisher these days, with blogging, Twitter and Facebook (amongst hundreds of other social media tools). What's more, there are many new devices on which to deliver content - tablets, smart phones, video web sites and more. The latter is what prompted MPA to change its name.

Ultimately it's a much larger and diverse media ecosystem than it was even a couple of years ago, so the increasing irrelevance of the word 'publish' probably doesn't matter much.

Perhaps the next update to Oxford Dictionary's definition of 'publish' will be along these lines: used to mean make something public using print, but now virtually everything is public online. Word discontinued.

That means that any approved application will be able to pull media automatically from your camera into your account online when you walk past an accessible wifi signal. Will the company be generous in approving use of its developer platform? Startups around the world hope so.

Eye-fi has offered its basic service for 5 years and sells its newest 4GB card with "endless memory mode" (stored media is automatically deleted once safely on your computer) for $49.99. Eye-fi bundles the cost of connectivity into the cost of the device, similar to how the Kindle does 3G, but in this case it's data writing not reading.

To date, users have been able to upload media automatically to 45 different sites, from Flickr to Facebook to YouTube to Costco.com. Online reviews of the service are generally very positive. Now any approved application developer will be able include this feature in their apps.

Market Strategy

It's a smart move by Eye-fi. An ecosystem of app developers adds a compelling feature and then every new customer those apps acquire is a potential new customer for the memory card manufacturer.

"Eye-Fi's wireless data card is without a doubt revolutionary in the way it enables real time publishing of photos over WiFi directly from the camera," says Marcus Mac Innes, founder of Irish photo sharing service Pix.ie.

"The out of the box publishing destinations however were limited and many Pix.ie users complained about not having a direct upload facility from Eye-Fi to Pix.ie.

"With the release of a developer API, Eye-Fi seems to be responding to the growing demand for openness which ultimately provides their customers with more choice with regard to publishing destinations.

"So long as Eye-Fi don't discriminate when it comes to commercial use of the new APIs, this move will be a win win for all concerned."

Eye-fi offers an iPhone app and last holiday season the company partnered with Google to offer a free card to anyone who upgraded to a paid Picasa account. Additional options include automatic geotagging of photos and automatic uploads from any AT&T wifi hotspot.

Below: Some of the places users can already upload media from the Eye-fi card.

We'll analyze a standalone iPad magazine app (Wired) and a service that offers access to many different magazines (Zinio).

Wired

Wired magazine has been the most high profile magazine to utilize the iPad's interactivity. Each new edition costs US$4.99 and is a fairly bulky download - the most recent 'Web is dead' edition was 482MB. But it is packed with interactive goodies.

The iPad version of Wired features videos, touchscreen infographics, slideshows, music and more. For example, a story about a small American town called Picher that has been "devastated" by lead and zinc mining, is accompanied by a video featuring Picher locals talking about the impact of mining on their town. It augments the story nicely and brings the reader closer to the issue.

There are some oddities to the Wired app, however. For example, you can't do the usual pinching motion to enlarge text that is present in most other iPad apps. So if the font type is too small for you to read, you're out of luck. The blog iA has a thorough critique of this and other issues. Also see our own Sarah Perez's thoughts on the sometimes confusing features of various iPad magazines.

But overall, Wired's app is the best example currently of a mainstream magazine utilizing the iPad's touchscreen and interactive capabilities. Below are two examples of the touchscreen functionality: on the left, the user scrolls with their finger to see a history of dogs; on the right, the user swipes their finger to see a graphical illustration of 'spin.'

Zinio: Multiple Magazines

Online magazine shops like Zinio offer up multiple magazines for purchase. Zinio aims to duplicate the print magazine reading experience in digital format. This description of itself on Google sums up what Zinio aims to deliver: "Same content. Same design. Delivered over the Internet."

Reading many of Zinio magazines on iPad is pretty similar to reading PDF files on iPad - there is little in the way of interactivity other than clicking the odd hyperlink and zooming in and out of articles. Some of Zinio's offerings have interactive features, but not the ones I've subscribed to.

So far I've purchased subscriptions to an art magazine called Juxtapoz, popular music magazine Rolling Stone, and a lifestyle magazine called The FADER. The main benefits to me are speed of delivery and lower cost. I've appreciated getting the latest editions as soon as they come out and not having to pay the premium that international magazine readers pay for print versions.

The reading experience leaves something to be desired, mostly because the text is generally too small to be read on an iPad without zooming in and out constantly. One zooms in to read an article, then zooms back out again to flip to the next page or navigate to another section. So there is more pinching and other finger movements than ideal.

Although I still read iPad magazines the same way as print magazines - sprawled on my sofa or bed - there are differences in the reading experience. For example, with the Juxtapoz print edition I used to flick through the magazine randomly admiring the artwork. Often I'd start reading whatever article happened to fall open in my lap. With the iPad edition, it's harder to randomly flip through pages and so you lose some of the serendipity of casually flicking through a magazine.

One benefit of the iPad edition of Juxtapoz is that you can zoom in and inspect art works close up - although given that it's essentially a PDF, the resolution is not ideal.

I still prefer print magazines from a user experience perspective, although I like the experimentation of Wired and others. However, overall I prefer iPad magazines due to speed of delivery, cheaper price and ability to access a whole archive from one app.

How Can Magazines Improve User Experience?

Wired's use of touchscreen functionality and interactivity is a start. But it feels a little too much like a self-contained app, with not enough tentacles reaching outside. No wonder they declared the Web to be dead. How about some commenting and rating features? Or links to Twitter and Facebook?

Also iPad magazines should take a leaf out of eBooks and provide features like highlighting, notes, word look-up, and search. When I am reading an article in Rolling Stone, I sometimes come across a pithy quote from a musician that I like - so it'd be great to have a way to highlight and share that.

If you're an iPad owner, what do you think about magazines on the device? Or if you don't have an iPad, let us know your thoughts on digital magazines in general. What features would you like to see?

Image credit: HAMACHI!