Book Publishing and Web 2.0

Chronicle Books, an innovative trade publisher based in San Francisco, has translated its quirky print products (e.g., gift items and clever kits) into an online bonanza. They feature podcasts, a blog, ePostcards, and videos, and they continually come up with ever more creative ways to make the Web a place to feature, display, and market their titles.

"21 Surefire tips" link fixed

Link fixed in 21 Surefire Tips Article and Sermo article below.

Apologies to those who were trying to follow the link before.

Pfizer and Sermo

Sermo is the largest online physician community devoted to sharing clinical information and trends in healthcare. Any member physician can pose questions, and get volunteer responses from other physicians. Pfizer and Sermo have just announced their commitment to a strategic collaboration in which Pfizer will share its knowledge base with the Sermo community. The expectation is faster and more focused communications that respond to specific clinical problems in real time.

Ad support as a complete business model for consumer mags

Since last week we talked about the viability of sponsorship as a sustainable business model for PLoS, I thought it would be interesting this week to look for a few consumer magazines that depend basically entirely on advertising, eschewing subscriptions altogether. I have to say that this was much harder than I'd thought.

Obviously, it's much easier for an online periodical than a print periodical to go totally over to advertising, asking for nothing from readers, but even the e-zines I looked at had small exceptions to the advertising-only rule. The Onion is an almost completely free publication that has had notable success both in print and digitally. Still, The Onion also makes some revenues from merchandise, though I can't imagine it's much; and people who live outside the free distribution range have to subscribe. Wired is a technology mag that sells the print version, but has completely free online content. It both recycles some features from the print mag and adds new stuff. The New Yorker has the same business model: it has completely free online access, which includes some but not all the print features, plus extras. Salon is an online-only magazine, without a print component. It upsells users, offering a huge amount of stuff for free (with the option, every now and then, to watch or to skip an advertisement), but it also suggests that you subscribe to Salon Premium.

Tangentially, here's an article (from last year) on how magazines are doing utilizing Web 2.0 constructively. It's kind of what you'd expect, but it's a nice summary.

Consumer Magazines

I looked at some of Rodale's magazines - Prevention, Women's Health, Runner's World, etc. They all have some Web 2.0 features (blogs, RSS feeds, videos, most popular ratings, etc.). I looked at these sites because previously I saw a video of an NYU conference last year on "Who's in Charge? Old Media, New Media... or the Consumer?" When I watched it, I thought it was interesting that Steve Murphy from Rodale talked about how the websites were deliberately decentralized and each magazine had an independent site. My company has gone back and forth about whether to focus online on the individual product brands or have everyone under a strong company brand.

21 Surefire Tips for a Successful Blog Launch

A really useful article on how to best promote your blog.
"The 21 points included in this checklist will cover the basics of what you need to do during those all-important first two weeks of your blog’s life. While there are no guarantees in the blogosphere, if you follow these launching tips closely, your chances of success are greatly improved."
See avivadirectory.

FYI. I stumbled on this using "StumbleUpon". It is also highly rated via Digg.

Some of you may want to use these tips for your own blogs.

Enjoy.

No Boundaries

Consumers have been enjoying National Geographic magazine since 1888. Now there's a TV channel (international and U.S.), as well as a web site and various other media associated with it, e.g., an Education site, Adventure magazine, National Geographic Explorer Classroom magazine, National Geographic Kids magazine, Traveler magazine, books, CDs, DVDs, maps, retail store, film projects and screenings, concerts, lectures, and exhibitions at the National Geographic Museum.

Their mission: Founded in 1888 to "increase and diffuse geographic knowledge," the Society works to inspire people to care about the planet.

Banks do Web 2.0

If a bank can do it, so can I. Techneophyte's first homework exercise: present a 2.0 site. Royal Bank's blog  meets several criteria. The student bloggers on it involve (1) people talking to machines, while voting on preferred bloggers is (2) "bottom up" and involves a (3) publish-and-subscribe mode vs. simple searching. Links to facebook and other social networking sites further make this site (4) relationship vs. transaction oriented. Users can link from there to a separate, student banking site on which Royal Bank offers (5) micro-aggregation -- pie charts, etc., representing that individual user's finances. Formerly, one would have to have a trust fund to merit such reporting. Now, in keeping with Web 2.0, it's power to the people!

STM Open Access Journals

The Public Library of Science offers an open-access collection of journals for the scientific community. The site hosts journals for Biology, Medicine, Computational Biology, Genetics, Pathogens, PLoS ONE (general science and medicine research), and Neglected Tropical Diseases.

The site is a model for how non-profit organizations (like the American Institute of Physics) could offer open-source access to their journals. PLoS charges the authors a fee to publish on their site to cover the cost of peer-reviewing among other costs.

For an idea of what open-source really means, this is from the site's FAQ:

Open access means everything published in PLoS journals is immediately available online for free. Read it, host it, print it, copy it, distribute it—all use is fair use, so long as the original authors and source are credited.

-B. Miller

Canada's GPHIN

The Global Public Health Intelligence Network uses machine-to-machine communication to search and filter Internet reports in various languages for information that may relate to public health threats—viral outbreaks, contaminated water supplies, famine, etc. It then passes the results on as HITs to be analyzed by officials at Canada's Public Health Agency.

Any organization may pay a fee to subscribe. While the subscription service is perhaps intended primarily for government or philanthropic health organizations, medical publishers could no doubt benefit from this service as well (as could anyone running a conspiracy theory website).

It's so effective that in February of 2006, Larry Brilliant, head of Google's philanthropic division, committed a $100,000 grant from the Technology, Entertainment and Design Conference to a project that will use GPHIN as the basis for an International System for Total Early Disease Detection.

I didn't find any info on how that's progressing so far—it may be one of those projects for which a 2–4 month time-to-launch does not apply.