There is a lot of noise out there about the new publishing industry. But is it really new? Has the industry moved on to a new mobile world order yet? The answer is a simple NO! There is MUCH yet to do.  

News Corp. introduces a ‘new’ publication, The Daily, that is strictly iPad-based. Other publishers are following suit faster than you can read this sentence. Then we have Flipboard and Zite. 

Flipboard: Very Cool Technology

Meanwhile, some cool apps, such as Flipboard, allow you to actually create your own custom designed ‘on the fly’ publication. That’s pretty cool. Flipboard doesn’t create an application that in turn is a publication (as The Daily is). It simply captures existing Web pages (the existing publication Web site gets the actual page views) from an as yet very select group of publishers and renders that page content (and all page content from myriad places as defined by the user) to an iPad, creating a personalized publication. 

Flipboard also grabs Facebook and Twitter feeds and content related to the articles – the idea is that it aims to allow the user to create a highly personalized publishing experience complete with inputs from the user’s social networks.  A new version will be leased on March 10, 2011; I haven’t seen any early versions of this…supposedly it will be twice as fast, still iPad-only, and have the ability to search across various social networks.

The Daily: Modern Old Fashioned

Here is one of my problems: The Daily, in spite of its upscale (read upscale to mean ‘iPad’) persona, and its rudimentary social networking and basic interactive capabilities, still feels to me like a traditional print publication – only it’s missing the paper. It is subscription-based and still relies on an editorial team to decide what will be delivered and made available as content every day, and it is edited and assembled in much the same way a traditional print product is built (trust me, I know a little bit about this stuff). It’s still old fashioned despite its modern, upscale iPad designer clothing.

It is also old fashioned in the sense that subscribers essentially ‘trust’ the editorial team to select the content for them. Sure, this is the ages-old foundation of publishing of course. But in today’s mobile social world, the dynamics are quickly changing so that the foundation of ‘trust’  isn’t simply moving towards, but in fact has already shifted to the consumer’s social network. Placing trust in the individual’s social network is an inherently open experience (the individual in essence ‘chooses’ the editorial team he or she trusts). Mobility adds immediacy, location awareness, and bi-directional feedback loops (to the user andfrom the user in real time). This, in turn, has signficant ramifications not only for publishing but for marketing and advertising as well.

Here is my other problem. The Daily is missing its online Web site. I know, wow – what does an online Web site have to do with mobility? Directly, not much. A bit more indirectly, however, and the answer becomes…everything! Today’s content-rich Web sites offer a substantial collection of resources that I simply do not want to give up. Further, I refer to ‘Web sites’ in the plural – the resources available to me are nearly endless, and in truth I do not want to give any of this up simply to have the equivalent of a print publication on my iPad. I’ll come back to this issue in an upcoming post, but for now let’s just keep in mind the distinction between the Web at large, and a ‘walled’ iPad app, which is more or less how I perceive The Daily.  

Flipboard meanwhile is still new and has a long way to go before it hits its true stride (or at least what I believe is the significant potential in its approach). But I like it a lot better than The Daily. It isn’t walled, it is flexible, it taps into numerous resources that the user directly identifies, selects and shapes, and it ties in social networking components in a way that I believe better serves the rapidly emerging me-centric/we-centric mobile world, where both receiving and disseminating information that is perceived by the user to be valuable to his or her web of social networks is critical.  

Zite: Possibly Cooler than Flipboard?

Let me toss in a third ‘new new’ mobile publishing product here: Zite, which launched on March 8, 2011. Yes, it’s another iPad app, and it’s similar to Flipboard in that it allows you to create a customized magazine. Zite goes a step further however, and attempts to ‘learn from the choices you make’ and attempts to add content that it thinks you may be interested in. 

Flipboard allows the user to customize a magazine experience; Zite looks to ‘personalize’ from its own end by analyzing how you customize and what you access. Out of the door it is able to comb through more than 500,000 Web domains (that is, the content-rich Web world I referred to above) to hunt down content that may be (and in the longer term is ‘likely to be’) of interest to the user. Zite will also attempt to use external social networking sources – such as your Twitter account – to build on its personalization efforts. 

I won’t be adding The Daily to my collection, but I will be running both the new version of Flipboard and Zite as soon as I can get an iPad 2 with its speedy graphics in my hands – it will be interesting to see how a long term faceoff will go between the two.

While thinking about the differences between Flipboard, Zite and The Daily, keep in mind what I wrote in two recent blog posts, about today’s mobile-centric user constantly functioning in both a me-centric and a we-centric world – where the key element in both is to receive AND disseminate what the mobile user perceives to be highly valuable, personalized information. It begs the  question…  

But are any of these really mobile?

Most publishers today are struggling to move out of the old digital domain – domains that are either bound to desktops with massive amounts of real estate or to laptops that have plenty of horsepower behind them to give you a suitably rich and enormously deep online experience. The struggle comes directly because the mobile world is quickly changing not only how – but why- we use information. My thoughts on the me-centric and we-centric world we are quickly evolving into fully underpins the the main issues that the publishing industry must address.

Prime issue number one concerns today’s mobile demand that a user always be kept proactively and contextually updated with ‘valuable’ information. The anytime, anywhere nature of mobility isn’t really addressed by Flipboard, Zite or The Daily. They are each fairly rudimentary attempts to break out of the old digital domain bind. These ‘apps’ aren’t so much mobile – which minimally requires location awareness – as they are portable.

It isn’t clear to me how advertising and marketing will fit in with these apps relative to their being portable rather than mobile. This is in fact a very deep issue – one that requires requiste deep and totally out of the box thinking by the publishing industry (and the related marketing and advertising market segments) about how to solve it.

I DO personally believe that the solution – I mean here the core general solution, not the specific solutions for every possible publisher, marketer and advertiser – absolutely requires a foundation built not on mobile apps but on interactive, multi-device, multi-source, multi-channel, location-aware, cloud-based ’mobile services.’ These mobile services must be able to tap into large scale, content-rich Web sites through both mobile Web technology and through the use of hybrid HTML5 Web apps.

Far easier said than done! But it is all do-able today.

I’ll take a deeper look at this in a follow-up blog post. Meanwhile, the thinking behind HP’s WebOs and TouchPad efforts, as well as the thinking behind what recently drove Antenna to acquire Volantis, and Antenna’s recent release of its new Volt platform all play directly into this. My blog posts on HP mobility, Antenna/Volantis and Antenna’s Volt are good starting points and good background reading.

∞

Tags: 2011 Trends, Enterprise Mobility, Flipboard, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Apps, Mobile Devices, Mobile Marketing, Mobile Observatory, Mobile Publishing, Seamless Mobile Services, The Daily, Tony Rizzo, Zite