I just received my “personalized magazine” from Time Inc. in my inbox. Curious and somewhat eager to take a look at what they billed as “custom publishing” — not customized, they said, for a specific company or group of users, but rather for me. On the Table of Contents page, they say it again: it’s “designed especially for you — by you.” Well, not really.
Basically, Mine is an experiment by Time that lets anyone choose five Time Warner/American Express Co. magazines — and then receive, a couple of weeks later for me, a digital edition featuring stories from each of those magazines. Magazines included among the choices included In Style, Golf, Real Simple, Time, Sports Illustrated, Food & Wine, Money, and Travel + Leisure.
A novel concept, definitely — and I think the idea of a customized, personalized magazine is actually intriguing. But I wasn’t impressed with this one. First, I really dislike digital editions. It feels embarrassing to flip pages online and to hear the little “swish” of the computer-generated page flipping sound. I also find them annoying to read and navigate: you zoom in for a closeup and then have to zoom out to see anything else. When doing so I’m already longing for touch technology.
Second to that, well, the content is just dull. It’s not personalized. There are just some stories picked out from each of the mags and plunked together. The only thing that did feel personalized was the ad on the back page, which just felt creepy: a Lexus ad that reads “The all-new 2010 RX: now with more Shannon Emmerson.” Ew. And yes. I’m sure they considered me carefully when designing a car I can not in any way dream of affording.
All in all then, I kind of hate it. But it does represent, I think, an entry point into genuinely customized products of the same variety. Fast Company wonders if Mine could lead to future mash-ups of newspapers:
Instead of subscribing to five magazines, why not just subscribe to one that has everything you want inside? And instead of subscribing to The New York Times, The Star Ledger, and your hometown newspaper, why not subscribe to a mash-up of all three?
I think there’s a good point to be made here, namely that while Mine is not mine, it could be, someday, done by somebody else and please, not in a digital edition.
Let thy speech be better than silence, or be silent.
~Dionysius Of Halicarnassus
I’ve been asked to speak at MagsU this June in Toronto on the subject of optimizing web content for search (SEO Toolkit: Put Search to Work for Your Magazine), which is very exciting — but also vaguely terrifying.
First, we all know that most people fear death more than public speaking, and while I’m probably not quite one of them, I get it. My husband has just started attending Toastmasters recently, and I’m considering joining him for at least a few sessions before I do the June presentation.
But secondly, the whole speaking thing makes me wonder who I am to speak on such things. I’m admittedly one of those people who apologizes when someone bumps into me or says something rude and I always preface my opinions with some version of “This is just my opinion, but …” so “speaking” on a particular topic, which implies that I actually know something about it, is just weird. I do know a few things, thanks to experience building a digital team and a bunch of magazine sites and making sure they get some traffic, and am more than happy to share, but I’ll likely still preface the whole thing by offering people the option to leave the room at any time if things get dull.
Just came across this post on Things You Can Control Right Now and in spite of my conflicting feelings for things bordering on new agey, it struck a chord.
Today: will focus on exercise (off to the gym now!) and creative/innovative thinking.
Is two enough for a day? Will report.
Here’s the commonplace quote:
“You can’t control the length of your life, but you can control its width and depth. You can’t control the contour of your face, but you can control its expression. You can’t control the weather, but you can control the atmosphere of your mind. Why worry about things you can’t control when you can keep yourself busy controlling the things that depend on you?”
-Unknown
my dear friend matt talked me into trying, really trying, out ‘the twitter’ recently and so, ok, i get it now. he described it as “ambient intimacy,” a description which i quite like, meaning that in general you can participate in your day with all of your friends (some real, some virtual, some becoming) sitting right there beside you chattering away in your twitbin. it’s kind of nice.
plus the links are fantastic. i’ve found myself following some smart-as-hell people who regularly post tidbits of what they’ve been reading and thinking and you know, i feel smarter for it.
they do say that people with more friends are more likely to live longer than those without, so i’m now going to believe that virtual friends count. is this pathetic?
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
~John Keats
follow me if you like – http://twitter.com/semmerson
Looks like I’m an Orca on GranvilleOnline.ca’s ‘Which endangered top predator are you’ quiz. I should have known!
YOU’RE AN ORCA!
You’re intelligent, but with a jealous streak. One of your finer points is your capacity for sophisticated communication, and your favourite topics is the peril of global warming. It’s fair to say that no one can ignore you when you come into a room. You’re formidable. There are no two ways about it: You’re an orca.Orcas are not an officially endangered species, but they are considered threatened by pollution, depletion of prey species, conflicts with fishing activities and vessels, habitat loss, and whaling. The orca is the largest species of the oceanic dolphin family. It is found in all the world’s oceans, from the frigid Arctic and Antarctic regions to warm, tropical seas.
It’s Wednesday morning, after a pseudo holiday yesterday, on Remembrance Day, and in going through my 111 emails this morning (yikes) I came across this quote by Annie Dillard:
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
What I love most about this quote is the “of course” because, truly, how can we not know this? And yet when I think about myself most of the time, it’s probably far more in the realm of who I want to be — or, unfortunately, who I’ve been – rather than who I am right this second.
Yesterday I took some time to go through my new office (which my lovely husband made for me, complete with a dreamed-about wall of books) and clean out boxes of miscellany. Among the things I stumbled across, which included cassette tapes of interviews with EA executives, old photographs of old lives, and a thousand non-functional pens, were old diaries and notebooks. In total, now that my husband has organized my things, I must have 35 or 40 of the things, with terrible poems, half-written song lyrics, and all the angst of 37 years. Going through them, I noticed two things: first, I annoyingly wrote for far too long about feelings, responses, reactions, omitting the actual meat of things — the facts of the matter, details about what the hell was actually going on. Infuriating. Second, I still for the most part sound like I sound in my head. Even at 21, when things were too dramatic for words, there’s a nugget there that I know. And not just because I remember it. Mostly I don’t. Mostly reading these old diaries is like reading those of a stranger. Sometimes fascinating, sometimes dull as stone. On the whole, though, I’ve spent a lot of days in interesting ways — and they do add up.
love it. it may look like a typo, but it’s a new word courtesy of diego rodriguez of metacool. “startegy” is, you guessed it, about just leaping in. doing something. thinking about it, sure, but not becoming mired in questions.
more from rodriguez:
In life, pick where you want to go as much as you can, work like hell to get there, and be persistent. Learn all the time. Do good. Engage everyone around you by pursuing your passions. Help others. Do good work. Bring cool stuff to life. Above all, start.
Most people have come into contact, at one point or another with the idea of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Roughly, he said that certain types of needs come first; for example physiological needs like food and water, and safety concerns need to be satisfied before one can focus on things like self-esteem, or even love. This morning I came across a blog talking about the elements involved in the very last, top state of the ‘pyramid’ of needs: self-actualization, and particularly got caught on this:
“Life is an ongoing process of choosing between safety (out of fear and a need for defense) and risk (for the sake of progress and growth). Make the growth choice a dozen times a day.”
~ Abraham Maslow (comments by Derek Sivers)
Derek Sivers has put together an excellent, simple summary of Maslow’s approach to ’self-actualizing’. I’ve copied it below as well, as I think it’s a great set of reminders.
Abraham Maslow’s 8 Ways to Self-Actualize
- Experience things fully, vividly, selflessly. Throw yourself into the experiencing of something: concentrate on it fully, let it totally absorb you
- Life is an ongoing process of choosing between safety (out of fear and need for defense) and risk (for the sake of progress and growth): Make the growth choice a dozen times a day.
- Let the self emerge. Try to shut out the external clues as to what you should think, feel, say, and so on, and let your experience enable you to say what you truly feel.
- When in doubt, be honest. If you look into yourself and are honest, you will also take responsibility. Taking responsibility is self-actualizing.
- Listen to your own tastes. Be prepared to be unpopular.
- Use your intelligence, work to do well the things you want to do, no matter how insignificant they seem to be.
- Make peak experiencing more likely: get rid of illusions and false notions. Learn what you are good at and what your potentialities are not
- Find out who you are, what you are, what you like and don’t like, what is good and what is bad for you, where you are going, what your mission is. Opening yourself up to yourself in this way means identifying defenses – and then finding the courage to give them up.
i discovered a lovely post this morning about focusing attention that perfectly describes what i’ve been struggling with: doing too many things at once. trying to do too much is my tendency, and i’m not sure where or when it began. my parents and brother are always described as easy going or laid back, whereas i, growing up, garnered adjectives such as perfectionist, driven, and busy. i’d prefer to be known as laid back, but i’m not. in any case, here’s what caught me:
Four years ago, I was an enthusiastic cookie fresh out of school, ready to take on the world and to finally “Achieve Something!” I saw other people’s successes and strived to do the same. Problem was, I was finding inspiration from several people more experienced than me, saw their results and then attempted to attack all of my goals at once.
right. no longer fresh out of school i believe i caught myself thinking the same thing this week: when the bloody hell am i actually going to achieve something? what have i done with my life? is there time to do anything else?
the prescription is, for the author of the quoted post, to focus. set fewer goals. banish diffusion. notice how you feel when you begin to do so.
the results? less guilt, less dissatisfaction, less exhaustion. and when your focus is on the right things (for you — there’s a handy ‘how to figure out your focus’ list too), more power in that area. more meaningful activity.
it sounds simple. i know it isn’t. but it’s a valid reminder for me at the right time.
Just came across a couple of excellent posts by Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0.
Most applicable to me is his blog post titled What Magazines Still Don’t Understand about the Web — but his earlier What Newspapers Still Don’t Understand About the Web is excellent as well. I found the comments to the mag article particularly enlightening — it’s comforting to see that the debate about whether or not to post content for free when it is being paid for in print publications is taking place in other areas of the world as well.
My take, ripping off Chris Anderson, is that mag content should be free online. People will continue to pay — at least for a time — for the real world privilege of being able to read a magazine cover to cover in the bathtub, but online, they will simply not read anything cover to cover. Looking at my own surfing behaviour, I do read entire articles but generally only one or maybe two at a go — online, there’s always something else to do. Put it up for free and build your business model around something else.
