On micro magazines

Yesterday, Seth Godin was making an argument for micro magazines, which he defines as digital (e.g. PDF), subscriber based (e.g. RSS or email), focussed, community and ad supported containers of well written pieces. 

The concept of magazine seems to revive electronically. With the launch of the iPad many publishers are rushing out electronic, slightly more interactive, equivalents of their paper based media. I don’t really mind they are doing it, it saves paper and distribution costs.
But I am not excited either.

The main reason that I am not excited about the electronic (micro) magazines is because of the difficulty of ‘sharing’ in the non web formats they use. Sharing an article from an iPad app, or from a PDF, is harder than just bookmarking it, or sending the link to a friend. Or starting a discussion around a linked article. There is no uniform interface.

Yes, there is hardly an end to all the content that is published online. But I don’t see how an anarchy of micro magazines will be able to change that. It just an anarchy of magazines against an anarchy of articles/blog posts.
So what is really different when (micro) magazines and blogs are compared? Well, I assume having an editor. I suspect that the main difference between a ‘blog’ and a magazine is that a blog is direct communication between writer and reader, whereas a magazine is revised by one or more editors. So yes, this might entail slightly less content, as not all content will be published. But who cares if there are just 1 million articles being published every day, instead of say 2 million?

Yes, we need more editors in the online world that curate all that is quality content. But we don’t need the stiff format of paper based magazines with ‘pages’. The web brought us the ability to link directly to articles, instead of containers of articles which magazines and books essentially are. The ability to link directly to an article also allows for having discussions around a certain topic closely tied to the original article. Additionally, we should not forget that the web is a publishing platform in itself. The view that a magazine is the platform that allows writers to publish their work is too limiting.

My future magazine will have personally selected (groups of) curators and editors, who select from sources I selected myself (or just all the sources those curators curate)… every now and then allowing recommendations from trusted sources. And even though I am not sure whether there needs to be an end to all the content that I can read in that magazine… its quality should indeed surpass the average quality found nowadays in simple feed aggregators that filter content just based on popularity. There is a need for more focussed, higher quality content. But ‘pages’ based magazines are not the answer.