For some time now I have been trying, both publicly and privately, to more clearly understand and communicate my gut feeling that the magazine format–and the mode of reading it represents–is not an anachronism in a networked media ecology. To that end I give you the following clip from Kevin Kelly’s book New Rules for the New Economy (which is freely available in a number of formats from his web site–see: http://www.kk.org/newrules/blog/about.php )

This clip, written more than ten years ago, is still spot on in describing the ways in which the network incorporates rather than replaces pre-existing forms of communication. In that respect we might see media, technology, and the network as more of a continuum which is not this then that, but rather a universal adaptive ecosystem where new forms and new ideas are not introduced wholesale and ignorant of the substrate in which they are cultured, but instead evolve within a framework of the adjacent possible.

On a side note: I would be criminally remise if I did not acknowledge three recent books which have greatly helped me clarify my thinking in this regard: Kelly’s latest “What Technology Wants” – Steven Johnson’s “Where Good Ideas Come From” – Douglas Rushkoff’s “Program or Be Programmed” – These three books read in succession have lit something of a dim fire in my mind and have served as the fertile compost of more specific thoughts regarding media, magazines, and the future of the form. Please buy and read them.

There is indeed a misunderstanding at work here, but I think it’s spencerotica who is misunderstanding my point in response to Khoi’s post (which does in fact question the relevance of the “mode of reading the a magazine represents”). As you correctly state a magazine “will never be able to match the depth or personalization of a social aggregation tool” – but that’s kind of my point. Magazines aren’t highly personalized and that’s a good thing. They represent a coherent point of view – a potential counterfactual that is even more necessary in an information environment that is predisposed to confirmation bias. The disintegrated, pick and choose flow of digital media is a wonderful thing (I live in Google Reader/Feedly and scan the feeds of 1135 blogs every day), but we lose something when we always play the single and forget that it’s actually part of an album. When we confine our intellectual investigation to a parade of fragmented ideas we are abdicating the true value inherent in the integrated whole. Ultimately it’s not about whether magazines are better than social aggregation or RSS – its about the fact that they are different in a very important and often overlooked way.

Marco Roth at n+1 magazine on the culture of victimization that fuels what he sees as the latent racism of the tea party movement. Not that I go in much for the broad brush approach to analyzing political movements, but he does a great job of explicating the ways in which the tropes the Tea Party uses have been used by ethno-nationalist movements throughout American history.

This is so incredibly simple and obvious it’s amazing that it’s not really common practice. It highlights the extent to which marketing communications is still mired in the demographically driven, generationally directed, yet hopelessly opaque bulk mindset of the previous century. Not sure if it’s because crafting more personal communication is perceived as too complex–or perhaps too creepy? I mean if Facelessbook starts talking to me like they are actually one of my friends I’m not sure that it screams “we respect your privacy” in the way Dyson would hope it might.

Building on my last post outlining what I think the dynamics surrounding the iPad magazine subscription issue are I give you the below – yet another sloppy piece of reporting, this time from arstechnica.com.

I pulled three paragraphs from that post which I feel highlight the complete cluelessness with which many analysts have approached this issue. The first paragraph ignores the existence of apps like Netflix – which allow the user to download their app for free and then either hook up their existing Netflix account or create a new one – all without leaving the app. Netflix uses UIWebView to achieve this. It should matter little to Apple – and seemingly does matter little – whether the user is pushed out to Mobile Safari proper or is presented the page inside the app using a technique like UIWebView. As long as the developer is not trying to tie that action to the user’s existing iTunes account or use the in app purchase Store Kit API to tap into that user’s account info and transfer that data out to a publisher controlled system, the transaction should be within Apple policy.

The second paragraph pulled from the ars technica piece is a quote from an unidentified source that makes what publishers want seem so benign that one could only blame Apple for the friction. At this point I will refer you to my last post – http://bit.ly/98ySqG – which fleshes out what I feel the publisher’s motives really are. In short, publishers seem to want to push Apple into a vendor client relationship that Apple simply does not want to enter into. One need only look to the history of magazines on the web to see that many publishers have had a rather hard time developing digital businesses and extending their existing payment and transaction systems from the four to six week pace of print to the real time pace of the web. Instead of making the large investment in re-tooling their systems to meet that pace, they simply offered up their content for free and hoped that web traffic would push their print rate base north and advertising revenue would cover their costs – it didn’t.

The third paragraph I pulled from the ars technica post is an example of plain old lack of research. If the writer had bothered to download and use a broader range of magazine apps he may have realized that the model he suggests is actually in operation already. One example is the app for The Nation – it offers up to a one year subscription for $17.99. The app – using the pixelmags platform – sells the subs through the Store Kit so Apple is collecting 30% – but there is no reason other than simplicity and good UX that it needs to do so. In doing it this way The Nation is sacrificing control over the financial transaction (other than setting price) and is ceding user data to Apple, but they are getting a drop dead simple implementation.

So it would seem that if you are a magazine publisher and you want to put your titles on the iPad and collect money for it you have two options – go with Apple’s Store Kit API and in exchange for 30% of revenue you do a very little heavy lifting and take on very little liability. Or roll your own system, use UIWebView, and in exchange for total control over the transaction and total access to the user data, build a high liability transactional system and take on all the responsibility that comes with that. The middle ground – low liability with complete access to user data – does not exist.