Saturday 7 April 2007

It's the future, I've seen it!

Apparently I am a bit late in catching onto this, but In my bid to look very busy while not doing any revision or work on my assignments whatsoever, I checked out this site that's been in the news. idiomag.com is a free personalised music magazine, which aggregates content from various sites, blogs and magazines and presents it in a flashy virtual magazine format.
What appears to be a good, simple idea, coupled with some funky design and a simple, usable interface seems to me like it should work. I would use it, anyway.
I can't remember who it was, but I heard someone the other day compare online content and multimedia with those newspapers in Harry Potter with the moving pictures (you know the ones). This is exactly that, combined with personalisation.
Although the virtual magazine format is nothing new (see Monkey Magazine for example) and is frowned upon by some in the online world, I have to say I like it. At the risk of sounding traditional(?) I do think that this magazine format works well and nicely bridges the gap between print and online publishing. The format would benefit from being more widely recognised by the (for want of a better phrase) less-web minded as a way of introducing RSS style aggregated content in an easy to read, recognisable format.
Idiomag's unique selling point seems to be the combination of the flash magazine format with personalisation via user-defined keywords and subject areas, as well as the ability for contributors to benefit from advertising revenue.
The site, which has just come out of beta this week, has been given a 69 per cent chance of success by .net Magazine and I will certainly be keeping an eye on it to see how well it works with more and more content.

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