While I was having my morning coffee at my one of my favorite little coffee shops in Berkeley – Nefeli Cafe – I picked up the local San Francisco Chronicle Datebook section and came across an article about 8020 Publishing. What I love about this story and this particular company is it is using Web 2.0 to create somethign “concrete” – it is actually publshing magazines based on the content provided by the community. As the article states in today’s publishing climate all the magazines are scrambling to find ways to get online; to increase their presence on the web.
So what 8020 Publishing is doing is the exact opposite. It is taking the content that the community provides to create, at the moment (I think they will branch out very soon), two magazines: Everywhere & JPG. To me this is where the internet gets interesting because it opens up all kinds of possibilities to create a global collaborative community but there is nothign to say that the product or even the goal (if I dare say so) can be to create soemthign concrete – an actual physical creation out of the “digital media”.
Both the magazines are really great and you should check them out – in fact 8020 says that JPG has a circulation of 35,000 and Everywhere is at 50,000. Not bad for a company that is barely a year old. This points to the fact that there is still a demand to hold that paper in our hands, to page through the glossy photographs.
In fact this reminds me of an interesting couple radio stories I heard on the show On The Media which airs on NPR: Down With Paper and Long Live Paper.
Essentially discussing the merits and demerits of paper and the electronic alternatives. One of the interesting things that I heard in the report – and it really speaks to me – is that when we read a book on paper we are using our hands and that that often acts as a guide to our eyes and esentially our brain. Whereas when you look at a computer screen it is all eyes – no other guide – and the hard part of the screen is it is constantly flickering all beit at an incredibly fast speed.
So for me – taking the power of Web 2.0 to create new content in a concrete non-electronic format it awesome. I am going out to buy these magazines this week for sure.
