There are new ways to read, new ways to write and new ways to advertise. Publishing is a rapidly changing high-tech business now, so the tools change the content and vice versa. Established publishers have lots of inertia, so the changes won't sweep the world overnight, but here in the blogosphere, there's a palpable sense of excitement. Here's a tour of Web publishing's next level.

Reading was the first thing that had to change before the business of Web publishing could change. Hardware, specifically smartphones and tablets, set the ball rolling. The tablet form factor has been on our minds for a while, but it wasn't until the iPad's capacitive touchscreen that tablets took off with consumers.

BBC.com conducted an interesting study of tablet users this year, which showed that the hands-on interface provides users with a sense of control. That's the key to making engaging tablet content.

Ten-inch tablets are a fine way to view a website, but new kinds of interfaces can better take advantage of the touchscreen (and lack of physical keyboard). That's why software companies have gotten out ahead of publishers in providing reading apps that can turn any content into tablet content.

Flipboard is a celebrated example, and it also just launched an iPhone version. It can pull any Web content into its pleasant, touch-controlled layout, and it also offers publishers enhanced options for Flipboard-optimized content. Many other Web companies have aped this model, the latest of which is Google. None of these apps has emerged as the answer, but the new Google Currents has some interesting advantages for publishers.

The other vision of tablet reading is the "content-shifting" model, best exemplified by Instapaper. Instead of simply viewing Web content through a new layout, Instapaper saves clean versions of Web pages on demand. When you click the Instapaper bookmarklet on an article, that article is synced to your Instapaper in a cleaned-up version containing only plain text and embedded media.

Unlike Flipboard and the like, there's no value-add for publishers here. Rather, Instapaper is, in a way, a competitor. If publishers want to make money off the content they host themselves, they have to make their own reading experience that's better.

New Ways of Writing

To match this new way of reading, publishers have to be bold. The iPad and the Kindle Fire both offer newsstands for publication apps, inviting media organizations to make in-depth tablet experiences, not just paperless magazines.

One of the best examples we've seen so far is The Guardian iPad Edition, which launched the same day as Apple's iOS 5 Newsstand. It sneaks the Web view in here and there, and it streams in some content, but much of the experience is native, giving the reader that sense of control that matters so much on the tablet.

But the new rules in publishing are empowering independent content creators, too. Social media have created a new class of publishing, in which content created by everyone gets stitched together into a narrative. But Storify has blurred the line again, turning social media into a full-fledged sense-making platform that can power a news site more like the ones we're used to.

The do-it-yourself publishing platforms have also become more powerful. It's a great time to be a WordPress publisher, because it's creating revenue streams for independent content creators and developers alike. And then there are next-generation tools like Jux, which has blown the notion of the blog wide open. Now anyone can make an eye-popping, full-screen, multimedia periodical that's fully touch-enabled and reformats to fit the desktop, the tablet or the smartphone as needed.

New Ways of Advertising

New publishing tools are great, but what publishing really needs is new business models. Yes, some legacy media companies are beginning to see real revenue from digital content, but the fact is that Web users have gotten comfortable with content being free. That means more ads.

Fortunately, things are looking up on that front, too. For one thing, thanks to WordPress and its partnership with Federated Media, ad revenue streams are now available to independent bloggers, not just mainstream sites. But there is also a whole new kind of advertisement on the horizon, one that takes advantage of the new hardware and the touchscreen sense of control. As devices get increasingly powerful, the limits on Web publishing fall away.

Disclosure: Federated Media is also RWW's advertising partner.

As a Web publisher with a strong video focus, we're used to facing pretty steep technical challenges in trying to get our content onto your TV. It's hard to believe that just two years ago the only device capable of playing Web content on TV was TiVo. With a relatively small installed base of 1.5 million subscribers and proprietary software, it was tough to get on the platform and even tougher to reach a sizable audience.

We can draw an interesting parallel here between the early days of mobile, before Web browsers were built into phones, and today's web-connected TVs. Years ago, the only way to get content to a mobile audience was through carrier or OEM placement, which was expensive and difficult for all but the largest brands. Today, with the exception of Apple TV, all the latest generation of web-connected devices support an open Web browser, allowing any publisher to get content onto the TV with nothing more than standard Internet engineering.

We're starting out in a more advanced spot with Web TV, and we expect that the space will quickly evolve into an open, Web-oriented ecosystem where gaining traction is less about relationships and more about producing quality content.

So now that Web TV is becoming more of a reality, what should we be thinking about when it comes to monetizing our content there?

With dozens of different platforms in development or already on the market, and consumers buying thousands rather than millions of each of these devices, the available inventory on any one of them won't be nearly enough to sell for a campaign. The only option is to consolidate all the inventory from every platform into one bucket, and target your creative to a much greater, platform-agnostic pool.

Advertising on these new platforms will likely need to be part of larger, cross-media campaigns that will be purchased as part of comprehensive buys on a given publisher's properties. A combination of limited inventory but a highly targeted audience of affluent early adopters lends itself to cutting-edge brands that want to reach this prime demographic. Hopefully, TV CPMs will be slightly higher than regular inventory as a result.

It will be interesting to watch this space evolve over the next year. Needless to say, the potential is huge and TV ads are a massive business: TV accounted for nearly 36% of the $148.3 billion U.S. advertising market last year, according to ZenithOptimedia.

Photo by gerard79

The Fliptop service is available in two formats - one designed for website publishers and another designed for web surfers. The first provides an embeddable button that publishers can add to their site. When clicked, this button prompts the user as to which topics they want to follow. A sports site could set it up so fans could just check boxes next to their favorite team names, for instance. Another option below the checkboxes lets you further refine the content you choose by keyword filters. So, here on ReadWriteWeb.com, for example, you could follow news about "mobile, real-time web, apple" etc. (Keywords are separated by commas).

After picking your options, you click "Next" and then choose how you want to be alerted - either via a traditional RSS feed or by email, Twitter, Facebook, or SMS text. If choosing the email option, you can even configure how often you want to be alerted - once per day, once a week or immediately.

For Consumers

However, you don't have to rely on publishers to begin using Fliptop before you can try it. A browser bookmarklet is available which lets you drag-and-drop a Fliptop button to your web browser's bookmarks. Click the new "Subscribe" button it creates when you're on any page that has an RSS feed (look for the orange icon in the address bar of your browser). When clicked, you can configure how you want to follow that site. At the moment, your only options here are email or RSS.

The service is simple, incredibly easy to use and useful for anyone who feels overwhelmed by their news feeds. (Gadget blog readers, rejoice! This product is perfect for you!).

The only downside to the service as it stands right now is that it requires you to fill out CAPTCHAs when signing up. These spam blocking tools force you to type in the blurry words you see into a text box before confirming your subscription. And if requesting an email subscription, you then have to click yet another confirmation sent to you via email to assure Fliptop that you really did want to subscribe. We appreciate that the company is looking out for us, but two confirmations is at least one too many for what should be a speedier service, in our opinion.

Will Fliptop Make Website Subscriptions More Mainstream?

The real question now is whether something like Fliptop will encourage more people to follow a website's content via an automated mechanism, be it a customized, filtered RSS feed or an email digest. The idea of subscribing to a website directly via an RSS feed is one that, for whatever reason, never quite caught on with the general public. However, those same folks probably use RSS without even knowing it - like when they follow their favorite blog on Facebook, for example. The updates they track there are, in most cases, automated via RSS technology.

Fliptop could potentially reach these same sort of non-technical users too, thanks to its simple terminology (publisher buttons say "follow" not "subscribe"), a clean layout and easily understandable filtering options. Now it's just a matter of waiting to see if any web publishers pick this up and place it on their site.

The white-label service LetMeKnow allows any web publisher to easily integrate the company's alerts technology into their web site by using just a small bit of copy-and-paste code. According to branchnext, that means the LetMeKnow platform can be implemented, tested, and released in days without placing the burden of software development on the web publishers themselves.

They call their technology "alerts-as-a-service" or "AaaS," but we think perhaps they haven't read that acronym out loud yet...it's not good. There's no need to use clever abbreviations to sell this product, though; the idea makes sense and can stand on its own without trying to join the "as-a-Service" bandwagon. Put simply, LetMeKnow allows anyone to integrate alerting technology into their site with little effort, adding additional value for their site's visitors, be them blog readers or shoppers.

Using LetMeKnow

After publishers implement LetMeKnow, visitors can use the service to stay informed about new posts, content updates, price changes, new comments, new reviews, saved searches, and more. The alerts they sign up for can arrive via email, mobile (SMS), instant messaging, RSS, or even via a downloadable Adobe AIR desktop software program.

Also included in the LetMeKnow service is the ability to add in extensible widgets that allow broadcasting of the alert notifications across the web, including to sites like Facebook, MySpace, and iGoogle. Users wishing to share their alert notifications can do so using email, Twitter, Delicious, Digg, and StumbleUpon, which are also integrated with the service.

Like Yotify, LetMeKnow also includes the social recommendation technology "AskFriends." With this, users can solicit input from their friends by sharing their scouts on sites like Facebook and FriendFeed and then gathering the responses.

For the Publishers

Besides the ease of implementation, LetMeKnow provides publishers extensive reporting tools which enable them to see how their site's visitors are using the service. There are 50 different metrics tracked that indicate how, when, and where the content is being viewed, shared, and published. Businesses using LetMeKnow also have the option to completely brand the service to their liking, so it appears to be a part of their web site and not some outside tool. Additionally, brandnext promises to deliver 99.9% uptime and support.

How much this will all cost or how well it will work isn't known as of yet. There isn't word on pricing for the service - only a sign-up form for those interested. However, if Yotify is any indication, LetMeKnow may be worth a look.