RSS 2.0 FeedPersonal Publishing is going to go viral! Take that to the Bank.
So once I decided to launch what is now TeleMedia Strategy magazine I went -where else- to the Internet to start some searches on what it took to do. Having been somewhat familiar with the traditional publishing business through co-writing and publishing my book, "Integrating Service Level Agreements" (John Wiley & Sons, 2002) I figured it would be a pretty complex and expensive undertaking. One that I was prepared to undergo nonetheless in the interest of furthering my skills and actually trying to provide some value to the greater telecom, entertainment, and media geek community (hey, I don't know about you but I wear the "geek" badge with pride).
So I spent a week looking at different desktop publishing software, learning about the business, looking at lots of web magazines, blogs, sutes, and the like trying to figure out what the back office infrastructure would consist of. Somewhere during one of my random searches I ran across a tiny company called Press Publisher. www.presspublisher.com run by a guy named Jason Bailey.
Now I'm currently planning a full-blown article on Press Publisher (with the company's blessing) so I am not about to steal my own thunder, but let's just say I was totally 100% blown away by what the company was giving away - yes, for free in its most basic form - in the form of an unbelievably user-friendly content management system - complete with paypal subscription capabilities! Needless to say, i signed up and started playing with the system immediately. That's all I'm going to say about this particular platform at the moment - you'll just have to wait for the article to get the full story.
Having said that - in general - now that fully functional web publishing is this cheap and easy it is going to take off! I believe this is the next logical step past blogging. With almost no costs, anyone can reach a large audience with what they have to say. It;s amazing. How amazing? I recovered almost 40% of what it costs me to run this magazine in the first 72 hours - with very little promotion or advertising beyond the authors' word-of-email efforts. This magazine will be cost-effective immediately. Of course, this is a labor of love - not a profit-making endeavor since the potential market is quite small, but wait until the next one!
Until next time...
John