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Watch Ben Brown’s talk on reader aware design, and building a valuable back catalog with the content in your website’s archives. This talk was originally presented at Austin’s Refresh meetup, and is now brought to you by Austin Tech Videos.
View the slides for this presentation here.
Read more about the concept of reader aware design or jump right in with our JavaScript tool, Aware.js.
Need a way to better merchandise the content you are creating? Sign up for Packa.gr, our multi-platform, multi-format publishing tool that can turn content from your existing website into premium digital formats like ebooks and iOS apps.
(Source: youtube.com)
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Preview:
Packagr’s cover management screen makes it easy to create great looking multi-platform, multi-format publications.
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This is a screenshot of the publish page inside Packagr, our multi-platform digital publishing tool. Packagr helps people turn the content they’re creating into beautiful products like ebooks and iOS apps that work on a variety of devices, and can be sold in app stores - a great way to get lasting value out of the things we post online.
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The slides from my recent talk at Refresh Austin about reader aware design and building better archives for web content are now online! View them here.
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Our multi-platform, multi-format publishing tool Packagr was featured on the most recent episode of Jeffrey Zeldman’s “The Big Web Show.”
Zeldman and Greg Storey discuss XOXCO and Packagr around the 40 minute mark, and say things like “Packagr, it’s crazy.” Please give it a listen!
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This video shows the slides for my hour long talk on reader aware design and building a back catalog, to be delivered at tonight’s Refresh Austin event, compressed down into 10 seconds.
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Our friends at Dark Rye have been nominated for the very prestigious James Beard Award for best group food blog. Dark Rye is a beautiful, multi-platform, touch-optimized magazine that publishes a ton of good content every month.
Congratulations to the whole team!
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Think about it: in an ad impression-and pageview-driven business, a service that allows users to opt out of the noise and get content delivered directly to them is dangerous.
From Our Regressive Web, an essay about how the relentless forward movement of technology causes many valuable ideas and important tools to be lost. In the above quote, Ryan Holiday is talking about the demise of Google Reader and the decline in RSS use generally, but this same argument could be made about any technology that threatens the pageview model.
Publishers need to start experimenting with and building alternative sources of revenue like paid memberships and direct sales of content through ebooks and apps. The trick is to find space in and around the pageview model to grow these new sources of income without upsetting the advertising business, something we’re trying to enable with Packagr.
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Anno NTK from the people who gave you NTK: exactly the same thing, 15 years late.
NTK (or Need to Know) was an email newsletter about the internet and technology culture that was published weekly from 1997 to 2004. (See Wikipedia). At the time, it was one of the best sources for news and insightful analysis of the rapidly evolving world of web publishing, startups, and geeky stuff.
The newsletter shut down in 2006, but the publishers have every single issue stored in perfect condition in their digital archives. Now, in 2013, they’re relaunching NTK in its original form, each issue to be sent out 15 years to the week after initially being published.
The archives of NTK give us an amazing view into what the cutting edge looked like at the dawn of the consumer web. Looking back at it, we can see how much has changed, and how much has stayed eerily the same. Take, for example, this excerpt from this week’s archival edition:
On Wednesday, MICROSOFT announced their second preview release of INTERNET EXPLORER 4.0. Within minutes, Versace was dead.
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This post originally appeared as part of XOXCO Dispatch #1. Sign up now to be among the first to read our posts.
It is amazing how much content is poured onto the web every day. Just yesterday, our friends over at Pando Daily posted nearly 9,000 words of original writing on their site in form of 14 essays. The homepage holds only 16 posts, which means that some time this weekend, all 9,000 of those words will, as far as most people are concerned, disappear from the space-time continuum.
The articles in your city’s weekly paper are allowed to live for a week. Magazines sit on the shelf for a month. But the things we create for the web content get one shot, 24 or maybe 48 hours on the front page before disappearing into the archives. Surely, in this age of unlimited, flawless reproduction, we can do better than leaving the things we create to crawl slowly backwards towards infinity, away from anyone who might care.
A site that publishes as much as Pando Daily does creates almost a novel’s worth of content every two weeks. Yet rarely do we spend the time to pause and look back at what we’ve got once the initial flourish of chart beats end. Are we missing something?
The second page of XOXCO’s blog gets just 3% as many hits as the first.
Our visitors are left to search or crawl backwards themselves, and our editors don’t have the tools to curate and repurpose the content they already own. How can we look back if there is only the stream?
This is one of the reasons why we created Packagr. We want to help publishers tap into their content archives and give some of the best stuff a second chance to shine - perhaps in a different format or venue, perhaps to a new audience. After all, who doesn’t like a good rerun?
The future we’re hoping to build through Packagr is filled with short, interesting ebooks containing essays and reporting pulled from blog archives a decade long. We’re hoping to help a million iPad zinesters get their short stories and magazine articles on the virtual shelves. We want to help digital publishers continue the long tradition of creating distinct artifacts of their time, to take the important things out of the stream and put them in context, their proper place in space-time.
And then we’ll sell ten thousand copies of those artifacts for $3 each.
We’re looking for publishers who want to build this future with us. You can be one of the first.
This is a post from XOXCO's company blog. XOXCO is a product design and development company based in Austin, Texas. We create apps, write code, and provide design consulting. Follow us on Twitter or visit our site to learn more.
