idiomag

Just realised that I never made a post about our redesign… It went live a while ago, and if you like or loathe it, please let us know so we can keep improving it. Based on feedback and traffic stats, we could see that the interaction buttons weren’t entirely useful or understandable previously, so we have cleaned everything up a bit. Hopefully it is easier to use now!

We also added in loads of new contributors, and more content types such as the funky photogalleries. idiomag is now running about 6000 articles a month!  And growing…

Just a quick post for now…

We have signed up loads of new contributors over the past week. These include the (self-proclaimed) “world’s premier music publication” - Billboard.com. Well, perhaps we are the “universe’s premier music publication”… ha.

In the last 2 weeks we have driven 3000 miles, visited 16 universities, and talked to over 100 representatives from student music and journalism societies across the country. Lots of fun!

We had a superb response, with almost 200 students signing up to be associate journalists with idiomag. So now, in addition to the great content we are syndicating from top publications, we will soon have local articles about your local music scene.

So now the fun stops and the hard work begins (yeah right!)…

If you want to get involved, whether contributing some articles, or helping us get the word out about idiomag, just drop us an email. Our new about page has those. And I have been warned that team photos will be uploaded there soon. Ouch.

Well, a lot has happened since we last posted here. The big players have been buying up the online advertising market, Facebook has allowed external apps in its social network, and last.fm has finally been bought by CBS (last.fm: please don’t change - we love you as you are!).

We have some very exciting developments in the pipeline for this month. We have been working hard on tweaking idiomag’s algorithms and content-base, as well as making the magazine more readable. Also, at some point in the next month or so, we will jump on the (very appealing) bandwagon and create some groovy Facebook applications.

We have had a good range of new contributors come on board, including JunkMedia, Ground Up Hip Hop, Losing Today and Chronic Magazine. This will really help deepen our content-base, enabling us to deliver a more relevant and interesting magazine. In addition, we are now broadening the content beyond gig and album reviews, to include interactive competitions, feature articles and some podcast-style sections.

One major improvement that we are just completing, is that readers will soon be able to join idiomag using their last.fm, iLike, MOG, or MyStrands username. From this we can immediately create a very relevant magazine, from their past listening habits. Much simpler and quicker.

Its also nice to see that idiomag is still picking up some great press, with recent mentions in WebUser magazine and Precision Marketing magazine.

Well thats about it for the moment. As usual, let us know your thoughts and suggestions.

Techcrunch announced today that Condé Nast (who bought Reddit last year) have just released a social networking site for teenage girls built around “customizable, rich media blog/journals and include text, photos, music and videos”. This is obviously interesting news for us, since we have a very similar interface, and have been considering the best way to integrate a networking aspect into the site.

It appears that Flip provides a funky alternative to Myspace, a bit like an online doodle-pad/scrapbook/photoalbum, and will probably gain popularity with its target market - creative girls, therefore attracting boys (and unless they put in place some decent security/verification features, older men).

It would be easy for idiomag to include the same functionality as Flip, and create a basic social network - but we are trying to go beyond this. We want to use social networking to build a community around readers’ magazines and interests, rather than a basic user-generated-content site which creates a tangent from our focus of quality content. Let’s face it, if you want to browse through profiles of (potential) friends, there are plenty of other places to do it. Watch this space…

So Youtube has now joined the growing number of social networks that motivate their contributors to produce popular content by sharing advertising revenue. And now, because Youtube is the daddy of all things cool (with good reason), everyone is talking about this model.

So that contributors can be rewarded fairly, idiomag decided six months ago to use this model, but with one significant difference: idiomag includes a moderation process. This is in line with our focus on delivering quality content, not just the rantings of every Tom, Dick and Harry (there are many sites that can do that). It also prevents the drive for lowest-common denominator content, or highly controversial content - both of which attract large viewing figures. For ourselves, the goal is to create a loyal readership that are attracted by consistent quality, rather than boosting short-term pageviews.

For advertisers, this is the latest announcement in a push for monetisation of the social-web, but simply filling the advertising inventories of the social networks is not the final frontier.

The big step up in both campaign effectiveness and user experience needs to come when forward-thinking advertisers start to use the mass of personal information to actually personalise their advertising. There are immense opportunities for adverts to become so targeted, and so linked to user action, that they reflect the same characteristics (relevant, helpful and unobtrusive) as the search advertising phenomenon.

Instead of users being force-fed advertising; it needs to be desirable and even sought out. As adverts start to actually add value to users (whether by being funny, engaging, or just plain relevant) the increasing effectiveness of campaigns will ensure that, through the strengthening of the ad-revenue-share model, contributors will get their just rewards.

If you write great content for a well-trafficked community or blog, and want a better way of being paid for it, idiomag is now accepting content via direct input through the content providers administration section and via RSS. Initially, content will be focused in the digital design and music fields, and idiomag will aggregate licensed content from many online and print publishers; delivering an individually personalized magazine to each user, based on our unique and very specific tag-targeting system.

Because the content is delivered in an immersive Flash magazine, it is able to incorporate stunning microsites and rich-media ads from related brands. These ads, delivered in such a targeted way, cost good money, so idiomag’s system of sharing ad revenue with content providers is not to be sniffed at!

If you’re interested contact me at provider [at] idiomag.com, and for a for a bit of fun 1 of the first 25 content providers to be accepted, providing a quality article in the fields of digital design or music, will receive a free iPod shuffle.