idiomag » General

From 1981: The future of newspapers

January 29th, 2009

Thanks to TechCrunch for highlighting this classic video:

“Even though the electronic newspaper isn’t as spiffy-looking as the ads imply, people using this system are excited about its potential.”

It’s incredible to think that newspapers have been experimenting with online editions for 28 years, and yet many are still about to die from resistance to change.

Posted by andrew Filed in General, Web 2.0

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BMI distributes more royalties than ever before

September 12th, 2008

Record labels and performance-rights groups have spent the last few years going bezerk about “lost revenue” due to illicit sharing and performance of copyrighted works. They’ve been blaming everyone from P2P networks to Girl Scouts for the steady decline in their profits (which probably has more to do with the ever-growing market for music downloads á la iTunes). It’s funny, then, amidst all these panicking businesspeople, that BMI, one of the USA’s largest performance-rights organisations, has announced a record turnover for the 2008 financial year.

Their press release says they made $901 million this year, and will dispense $786 million in royalties to copyright holders. Imagine that, a global recession looming and your business’ profits only increase 7.2% this year! Time to tighten the belts, maybe?

Posted by marcus Filed in General, Music, Web 2.0

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The future of print is here… almost.

September 9th, 2008

In case you have missed the buzz around this, Esquire are celebrating their 75th anniversary by including an E-ink cover on their October edition. It doesn’t look as incredible as you might expect, but at least the technology is nearing the point of adoption by publishing houses.

You can see a video of it here

It basically consists of a few flashing panels announcing that the “future is here”, and you can see what it looks like when taken apart at Make magazine’s blog

It looks like it’ll still be a while until e-paper will support an application like idiomag… but hey, at least we can look forward to walking into a newsagent and being visually assaulted by a array of flashing, talking, animated magazine covers. Kind of like a real life myspace profile experience. Awesome.

Posted by andrew Filed in Announcements, Buzz, General

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Survey result visualisations

August 20th, 2008

Although I have already posted (twice) with a few details about the survey results, I just came across wordle - a great little tool for creating “text cloud” visualisations from data. So I ran our survey response data through it, to give an idea of what the responses are.

Obviously there are a few issues like 1) separation of key phrases into single words, and 2) the inclusion of frequently-repeating words that are incidental to the meaning of the answer. But given that it took me about 5 minutes to pass the response data through wordle and get the following output - I think it rocks!

Here is a visualisation of the responses to the question “Why do you like idiomag?”

And the question “What can we do to make you come back more?”

And finally, the question “Which other music sites do you visit to get your music fix?”

Pretty cool hey!?

Posted by andrew Filed in Announcements, Development, General, Web 2.0

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Is that a digital projector in your pocket?

March 31st, 2008

I never blog about general tech news here, because most of our readers are pretty up-to-date from other sources, but I thought this one was worth it.

I have been chatting with loads of people recently about mobile app development, and with idiomag in mind, the restriction of mobile phone screens have often been quoted. The iPhone obviously moved things forward in terms of screen format, bringing the laptop and mobile formats closer together, but there seems to be a perception that mobile browsing will always mean squinting and peering close to the screen. I have been keeping an eye on the development of mobile projectors, and over the weekend I saw that the NYT picked up on this innovation, and ran a good article explaining it.

Basically, there are already 16 manufacturers working on tiny projectors for mobile phones, and by 2012 the market is predicted to be $2.5bn for companion projectors, and $1bn for projectors built in to phones in the same way that cameras are now. So very soon, you will be able to get a big-screen experience from a small-screen device by pointing it at any flat surface. With this in mind, mobile app developers should totally change their thinking about interface design constraints.

Posted by andrew Filed in General

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Billboard & idiomag

October 12th, 2007

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.

Posted by andrew Filed in Announcements, Contributors, General, Music

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Another “vote for us” plea: But this one is much cooler

October 9th, 2007

The web design tyrannosaur, .net magazine, who have featured us on no less than 3 occasions, are holding their annual Awards. So please click here and vote for “www.idiomag.com” in the following categories:

Best New Site
Web App of the Year
Interactive Award
Innovation Award

If you are feeling suitably generous and want to go the extra mile, you could also vote for “www.thrusites.com” as the best Design Agency of the year. They have done a great job helping idiomag develop.

Now relax with that warm fuzzy feeling, knowing you have helped us. Thanks!

Posted by andrew Filed in Announcements, Buzz, General

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We (heart) universities

October 8th, 2007

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.

Posted by andrew Filed in Announcements, Contributors, General

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General update. At last.

June 2nd, 2007

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 beenÂ bought by CBSÂ (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 someÂ groovy Facebook applications.

We have had a good range of new contributors come on board, includingÂ 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.

Posted by andrew Filed in Advertising, Announcements, Contributors, Development, General, Web 2.0

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Google, don’t be evil.

April 25th, 2007

Google can track our ideas and interests from conception (search patterns) to conversation (gmail) to commerce (google checkout). All great products… and I congratulate Google forÂ lining up such a deep range of products that compete well as stand-alone services, but also can collect such valuable advertising information.

They have conquered contextual ads, they have moved into TV and radio adverts, and now bought DoubleClick’s superb technology and client base. DoubleClick’s reporting systems will certainly be useful as formats become larger and more rich-media focused - especially as TV and online continue to merge in terms of formats, targeting and reporting.

Tim O’Reilly seems confident that Google doesn’t pose much of a risk to privacy, and states that Google is being held to a higher standard than other information owners. Well, as aÂ certain wise man once said, “To whom much is given, from him much will be required.”

Posted by andrew Filed in Advertising, General, Web 2.0

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