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Fanzines and Blogging - Pete Ashton

Pete Ashton was a bookseller I knew back in the early part of the century working out of Waterstones, Leadenhall Market, London. When he quit the book trade for pastures new, we kept in touch. He was the guy who helped me start blogging, and since those days he's become something of an authority on the subject. Recently he started a digital communications consultancy up in Birmingham, and has started a new blog called Ash-10 to document his new profession. Among other things, he's written an excellent post called Lessons from Zines which aligns the years he spent pre-Internet reading, writing, publishing and distributing comic-related fanzines with the blogging world he witnesses in current times:

And I wasn’t alone. There were, I discovered, hundreds of thousands of people like me who were producing their own magazines with print runs ranging from ten to a few thousand, the majority “printed” on FE college copiers or at sympathetic copy shops. And the legacy went back to the 1970s and the punk movement. 1976’s Sniffin’ Glue was the legendary one and I saw a few copies in the 1990s. They were badly-typed single sheets of A4 roughly stapled down the side with the headlines written in marker pen, but they were the lifeblood of the nascent punk scene doing the work that the mainstream music press would not or could not do.

But more important than the ability to publish was the way these publications enabled communities to form between the readers who were also publishers and the publishers who were also readers. Every zine worth its salt had a reviews section at the back where it listed other zines with their addresses. Sending a bunch of 50p pieces (securely wrapped in cardboard) and SAEs to these addresses would give let you into a whole new world, and each of them would lead you to more zines. People would write letters to zines and their addresses would usually be printed too so you could correspond directly with others around the country and the world about that niche subject that in your town only you were interested in. From these networks came exchanges of ideas, collaborations on projects and deep friendships which would not have otherwise happened. (And, of course, personality clashes, legal threats and bitter wars of words.)

Read more: Lessons from Zines

Robert McCrum on the Changes in Publishing

Literary publishing always seems to me a long way removed from the area that O'Reilly works, as if the whole mainstream publishing programme runs on an entirely different business model to ours. But really, it's the same thing but at a different scale. The Observers' literary editor, Robert McCrum, is leaving his job after ten years, and has written a ten-point breakdown of the big changes he sees affecting the industry:

First, despite the steady evolution from typesetting to digitisation, the printed book has held out against electronic options. It is as if, after lift-off, the Apollo mission turned out to be not a space capsule but a Spitfire.

Second, it remains the paradox of the world wide web and the global economy that, while this has been the decade in which millions have found a voice through the internet, only a minority has discovered an audience. Self-expression has been democratised, but books and writers still face that age-old struggle to achieve a readership. How they do that remains a mystery, but in the alchemy of literary success, 'word of mouth' remains essential.

Steve Bowbrick on the Word Podcast

Steve Bowbrick appears in this month's Word magazine and on their podcast, talking about Wikipedia. Always worth a listen.

Also worth a listen is The Word's new podcast about the music business:

We're launching another podcast stream called "Backstage" which features occasional conversations with people who know how things operate in different areas of the entertainment industry. Hopefully it gives people a chance to get a better understanding and maybe passes a commute or two. The first one is with Jon Webster of the Music Managers Forum and touches on money, rights, Radiohead, merchandise and a world where record companies no longer rule the earth. Get an extract and subscribe to the podcast for free.

Dan Hill on Monocle

Dan Hill has written a fantastic dissection of the design and implementation of Monocle's website.
Monocle was launched about a year ago, and Dan joined from BBC Music and Radio Interactive to help create its web presence, building on the design of the magazine but also asking questions of what a website should be. What's interesting about this is that instead of going the Web 2.0 route, they chose a much more bespoke approach, putting together a highly designed site with carefully controlled content and layout which flies in the face of current thinking in this age of Social Networking and actively-sought contribution and community. The net result is a thriving hub of guaranteed quality and considered opinion, and as importantly, a successful business.
Get yourself a cup of coffee before reading it, because it's a long piece, but the fact that Dan has laid out Monocle's thought-processes and working practices so succinctly and transparently means this is required reading for anyone putting together a sizeable company website.

Monocle design notes
Monocle was conceived as a multi-platform brand from the start. Tyler Brûlé's work since Wallpaper* included a design and branding agency, Winkreative, and editorial production capacity, Winkontent. The latter had produced TV programmes (BBC4's The Desk and Counter Culture, for instance) and Tyler himself had started as a broadcast journalist (with the BBC and others). So an understanding of what makes good audio-video content was certainly present in the building to begin with, and my experience from the BBC reinforced that. It was definitely part of the plan for Monocle. We wanted to make Monocle a journalism brand that you had a weekly relationship with via the internet, as well as the monthly relationship via the magazine. Ultimately, this should be daily, if aspirations come to fruition. This weekly relationship would be through a form of broadcast media, using the internet’s ability for distributing video - something enabled only in the last couple of years, effectively - and thus conveying the sense of a Monocle broadcast news element, complementing the ‘book’.

The challenge was to create a working environment that would produce it, and then an online environment that could distribute it.

Via Pete Ashton

Telegraph.co.uk Developer Weekend - 26th/27th April 2008

The UK media company The Telegraph is hosting a Developer Weekend 2008 at their offices in Victoria, London on the 26th-27th April, 2008:

This event offers the chance to:

# hear from some of the industry's best speakers about their views on where the news, media and technology industries are heading;
# meet and talk to key technical staff from Internet companies like Digg, Adobe, Apple and Google;
# gain a deeper understanding of the latest developments on these platforms and participate in focussed technical training sessions;
# participate in a product development competition, which will mix great content with great technology to create some fantastic products. Prizes wil be awarded to the top 3 products created.

You have till the 18th April to apply. Sign-up here.

Guardian News and Media To Up Their Developer Services

Guardian News & Media have hired Matt McAlister from Yahoo's developer network in order to open up their web services to outside web developers:

Mike Bracken, technology director for development at GNM, part of the Guardian Media Group, which publishes the Guardian, Observer and MediaGuardian.co.uk, said McAlister has a "formidable track record and an international reputation for innovation".

"The significant thing is to think about the Guardian as a platform, and not just a publisher," added Bracken.

He said Yahoo had built an offering around search and maps, so the next question for the Guardian would be to work out which assets would be most relevant to make available to the developer community.

"We want to allow people to connect, and will provide data that people they can reuse and be creative with a vehicle that will help engage smaller agencies and development team in other companies create applications," Bracken added.

Chipwrapper - Toolset for UK News Sources Search

A few months ago, we linked to Martin Belam's site, currybetdotnet, where he had written a comprehensive round-up of the Web 2.0 activities of the web sites of the major UK newspapers. Martin has just launched a new site called Chipwrapper, a set of tools to search the sites of major UK media outlets."The main part of the service is a Google Custom Search Engine. This allows you to search Google's index, but only see results from the major newspapers and news sources in the UK." Tools include a Chipwrapper OpenSearch plugin for Internet Explorer 7, and a Chipwrapper custom button for the Google Toolbar.

On currybetdotnet, he explains what it's all about and how he's done it:

The headline buzz is built by using a Yahoo! Pipe which takes the top ten headlines from the 11 main UK news sources - BBC, Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Guardian, Independent, ITN, Sky News, The Sun, The Telegraph and The Times.

A script then analyses those headlines, and makes a league table of popular words, with the dull ones like 'we', 'they', 'and', 'of' etc stripped out. The top 7 of these appear on the Chipwrapper homepage and link through to the Chipwrapper search results for that word.

The whole list is also available as an RSS feed. This refreshes every hour, and contains each word that occurred in 3 or more headlines and the number of times that it appeared.

Build stuff yourself

One of the defining ideas of Chipwrapper has been to build it using free (as in costs nothing) software and Web 2.0 tools and services. In fact, aside from the domain registration costs, and a bit of Bytemark hosting costs, it hasn't cost me anything apart from time.

I have dreams of Chipwrapper widgets and gadgets and map mash-ups well beyond my capabilities though, which is why there is a 'Make stuff' page.

This lists all of the contributory pipes, feeds, XML and bits'n'bobs that make up the service so that people can hopefully build new tools based upon it. I hope I'll be able to list those on Chipwrapper in return.

To qualify Chipwrapper's customisability, Martin has launched a Rugby Union version for the start of the Rugby Union World Cup.

(Via Pete Ashton)

Newspapers 2.0: Currybetdotnet Investigates

Martin Belam of Currybetdotnet concludes his review of the eight daily British papers, (The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Telegraph, The Daily Mail, The Daily Express, The Mirror, The Sun - not surprisingly, he didn't bother with soft porn Daily Star: does Reader's Wives count as User Generated Content?) to see to what extent they have embraced the web options that fall under the Web 2.0 umbrella. He looks at RSS feeds, Social Bookmarking, Incorporation of User Generated Comments and Blogs. These are his summary comments on RSS:

All of the newspapers I looked at now provide a range of RSS feeds. Most provide not just their main news and sport content, but also feeds of a selection of features and comment. Some provide feeds for bespoke events, like Big Brother or The Ashes.

For a long time people have spoken of 2007 being a watershed year for RSS to gain momentum as a technology with a critical mass of use, now that it is incorporated into Microsoft's dominant Internet Explorer browser and Office suite of software. British newspapers are well placed if that increase in consumption happens.

Some of the newspaper use third parties to serve their RSS content - The Mirror and The Sun are powered by Mediafed, whilst the Daily Mail uses FeedBurner. Some implementation problems still exist though, notably with the Daily Express and more seriously with The Times.

Of the newspapers I looked at, The Independent provided the most feeds - if you discount the literally thousands of per-author feeds spewed out by The Guardian's "Comment Is Free" site, and all of the newspapers I looked at only provided snippets of articles in their feeds.

(For greater depth see the review of each paper: Daily Express, Daily Mirror, Daily Mail, Guardian, Independent, The Sun, The Telegraph and The Times.)

It's curious to see the papers flurrying about trying to get up to speed with the web when not so long ago many of them were telling us the Internet Would Putrify Our Spleen, or some such nonsense. Web 2.0 has been a handy catch-all behind which they could re-group their efforts, and a useful checklist of the benefits the stockholders would see when their newspaper invested in web technologies: I can imagine meetings where Executives were heard, 'We need some of this Web 2.0 stuff: what is it, exactly?' All these web sites are really in their infancy, (but aren't all web sites the world over when there's so much development ahead), but trying to positive, at least they are listening and trying to make an effort. Having said that, this being British media, who can be particularly vicious when they want to be, we still get to laugh at them while they  desperately trendify themselves.

I'd be interested to hear from readers in other countries how Web 2.0 has been embraced by their national newspapers. Are they all Web 2.0-ed up or are they still mired in Print 1.0?

Schultz and Webb in the Daily Telegraph

The Daily Telegraph has an interview with Schultz and Webb:

Schulze and Webb had an unusual problem - when they spoke to potential customers they would get offers to design websites or graphic material. But that wasn't what they meant by "design". "Bits of plastic and microcontrollers," says Webb, "the future world of products." These were the things that excited them.

Friends advised two strategies. One: find a way to communicate to people what you do in language they can use with others (such as their bosses). Two: make things that encapsulate the kind of work you want to do and hope people discover them.

(Thanks, Sarah.)

PC Professionell Looks Cool

The German computing magazine, PC Professionell, has been redesigned, and very handsome it looks, too.

Creative Review explains:

Eschewing the Photoshopped-within-an-inch-of-their-life monstrosities that adorn most covers in this sector, the new-look PC Professionell goes for a rigorously controlled typographic approach. This hardcore approach is replicated inside as the designer’s perennial urge to tidy up is brought to bear with extreme prejudice.

The new design was developed under the direction of Ralf Weißmantel of SpiekermannPartners, the studio set up by Erik Spiekermann and five others. “The layout ought to enable improved ease and quality of reading, in order to do justice to the magazine’s quality of text and high density of information,” Weißmantel explains.

(Via City of Sound)