idiomag

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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New York, New York

August 7th, 2008

idiomag has been chosen as one of several top UK startups to participate in a UKTI-sponsored “Digital Mission” to NYC in September. There are some great companies going, including our friends at Huddle, and some really interesting media startups.

We will be at the Web 2.0 Expo as well as meeting lots of potential partners throughout the week. Do let us know if you are in the vicinity and would like to meet up.

Posted by andrew Filed in Announcements, Buzz, Web 2.0

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New dashboard - what d’ya think?

August 5th, 2008

We are looking at changing the current “cover-page” (what you see when you log in) to a dashboard of your music taste. This aims to give you a better overview of the content in your magazine, so you can immediately jump off into whatever interests you most.

We have done a mockup here - see what you think, and click on the new features to add comments.

Thanks!

Posted by andrew Filed in Development, Web 2.0

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More survey results…

August 4th, 2008

As I mentioned in the last post, we recently conducted a large-scale user survey (approx 1000 respondents), and the results are proving very interesting. Here are some snippets…

idiomag users are very active on the major social networks

The vast majority of you liked the “page-turn” magazine format.

The proposed new features (search bar, related article links, video playlists etc) were very well received (and as a result they will be released shortly).

It was interesting to find that very few of you use other music news and reviews sites. What was more interesting is that amongst those that do, there are no clear favourites. With the other music site types (social networks, playlist sites, mp3 stores, etc) there were very established leaders, but the “news and reviews” audience seems fragmented across many sites.

Male respondents focused their product suggestions on performance, content volume, and technical issues, whereas female respondents requested interface improvements, better social networks features, and better quality content.

Most interestingly, the data seems to suggest that idiomag has two types of user. The majority of you value the breadth of content, and come to browse idiomag on a (usually) weekly basis to get their music fix about the artists you like and recommendations idiomag has made. And then there is also a smaller, but very active, group of you who use idiomag as a newsfeed. Instead of coming on a regular basis, you value the daily updates and only check in when there is an article about a band in which you are specifically interested. We will obviously bear these two groups in mind as we continue development.

There ya go. Hope you enjoy the new version of idiomag which will be out soonish…

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

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We are listening :)

June 30th, 2008

Over the last two weeks you will have likely seen an insert in your idiomag, asking you to complete a survey about our current service and what we can improve. We have had over 1000 responses, with loads of very detailed and interesting suggestions.

We will be sharing the results of the survey over the next week or so, but some interesting trends are already emerging…

The personalised music playlists, our last sizable feature addition, has become a fundamental part of your experience, with almost 60% of you listing it as one of the main reasons why you come to idiomag (news and reviews are still the focus, with 76%).

We are going to revise the frequency of the updates, with many people saying they would prefer a weekly magazine. We aim to put the decision in your hands, so that you can choose how often it updates.

From the responses, it seems that there is no single site where most people read music news and reviews. There are several music listening sites, like last.fm or Project Playlist, which are very popular with our audience, but for news and reviews, it seems that no leading service has emerged. Which is clearly where we fit in…

Also, our proposed new features have received a great response. You can see some of the new features here, and provide your feedback right on the page.

That’s enough for now, but thanks for proving once again that you are a passionate and intelligent section of society. Much appreciated!

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

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Presenting… The Uberwidget

May 22nd, 2008

The few thousand of you that installed idiomag’s Facebook app will have noticed that over the last few months it has experienced problems as the number of users have grown. So, we have rebuilt our embedded magazine, and it is now available as a widget on all the major social networks, startpages and blogging platforms, and as a full application on Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, Hi5, Friendster and Orkut.

Click here to get yours and find out more.

And let us know what you think. For your viewing pleasure, I have embedded a short video screencast giving an overview of the widget.

It has some really funky features, but basically it is an awesome way of staying up-to-date with the bands you love, and finding new bands you might like. Interviews, reviews, videos, and mp3s all mashed together on your profile page.

Share with friends across multiple social networks
See what your friends read
Share your mag with friends
Daily updates
Expandable videos
Personalised mp3 playlists

We think its all pretty awesome. But that’s irrelevant. Please let us know what you think. And as usual… it will get better over the next few months as we incorporate your feedback.

Thanks!

Posted by andrew Filed in Announcements, Development, 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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Personalised playlists launched!

March 7th, 2008

We have now launched what has been one of the most-requested features for idiomag - a personalised mp3 player to accompany the magazine. You will now receive a playlist of suggested tracks, based on the selection of articles that you are reading.

Previously, relevant music was targeted to each article, but there were few playback controls. This independent player now allows you to have complete control whilst reading the magazine, with integrated click-to-buy links, and optional intelligent-skip functionality: to fast forward the playlist to the relevant track when the page is turned.

Hope you like it as much as we do. Please let us know how we can improve it - and it goes without saying that we will be increasing coverage of artists and improving the quality of selected tracks over the next month or so.

Personalised mp3 player

Posted by andrew Filed in Announcements, Development, Music

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Interface redesign

February 25th, 2008

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!Â And growing…

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

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