Google Magazine Patent

Google granted a magazine patent

Techcrunch reports on a patent issued to Google called “Customization of Content and Advertisements in Publications.” It speculates that Google is about to create a magazine template that people can insert personalized content into, and wrap advertising around, and may even go as far as creating kiosks where people can print out and quick bind copies of “their” magazines. Techcrunch pulls a description from the patent application in which Google describes what it sees as the limitations of current magazine publishing.

Consumers may purchase a variety of publications in various forms, e.g., print form (e.g., newspapers, magazines, books, etc.), electronic form (e.g., electronic newspapers, electronic books (”e-Books”), electronic magazines, etc.), etc. The publishers define the content of such publications, and advertisers define which advertisements (ads) may be seen in the publications. Since consumers have no control over publication content or advertisements, they may purchase a publication that contains at least some content and advertisements that may be of no interest to them.

Publishers often lack insight into the profiles of consumers who purchase their publications, and, accordingly, miss out on subscription and advertisement revenue due to a lack of personalized content and advertisements. Likewise, consumer targeting for advertisers is limited, and there is virtually no standardization for ad sizes (e.g., an ad that is supposed to be a full page may need to be reduced in size to fit within a publication). Accordingly, advertisers sometimes purchase sub-optimal or worthless ad space in an attempt to reach their target markets. Advertisers also have difficulty identifying new prospective market segments to target because they have limited insight into the desires and reactions of consumers.

Magazine Dreaming

For a while I’ve been dreaming about a magazine template, and on April 23rd, I published a list of features I wanted for a magazine I’d call REFLECT.

The most radical thing about this magazine is the editing software. There’s no “editorial” content in Reflect. It’s just an empty electronic shell that people fill with their own content, it reflects the readers interests, not the editors, but there would be an “issue profile” on de.licio.us that shows how various readers, including the editors of the magazine, are compiling the content of their own magazines, that anyone could upload to read.

The name of the magazine, Reflect, suggests a careful thoughtful reading of articles or images, but there would be design prompts coded into the images and articles downloaded that would ‘reflect’ the intentions of the writers and photographers and magazine designers. Although Flickr has an option that allows a photographer to show the photograph in several sizes and suggest an optimum size, Reflect could take things further, and make colour and texture adjustments (matte or glossy) and position the image on a page, much in the way that movies are letterboxed to show how they originally appeared on a larger screen.

A Little Background

Writing about the media rather than being in the thick of the fray suits me. By nature I clip and treasure and hoard pieces of journalism: radio shows as podcasts in i-Tunes, articles and photographs published online in a de.licio.us file, and pieces of print journalism pasted into scrapbooks. I admire and reflect on what other journalists report and the reporting that I do carry out (stories on mythology, technology, business, genetically modified foods and agribusiness) emerges from reading and interpreting symbols, financial documents, government reports and scientific studies. Being edited well is more important to me than being published prominently, which is how my career has taken some strange turns into side-alleys that have no connection to the media. My favourite portfolio pieces are the text for a book on the retail design interiors of James Mansour, published only in Japanese, that I no longer have the English translation for, and an essay on the telerobotic art projects of Ken Goldberg, now Director of the Berkeley Center for New Media, that was translated into Portuguese and Spanish.

I have a sideline custom book-binding business. By reverse-engineering what I now know to be a poorly made hardcover book that I bought for a dollar at the monthly book sale at the Los Feliz branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, I formulated a rapid binding technique. The method is close to the comb-bound documents that can be made up at Kinko’s, but the document looks like a genuine hardback book. The whole thing can be taken apart and put back together again, endlessly and easily. I imagine hybrids of electronic and paper books using paper components now available: solar-power sources made of paper, cardboard speakers, transistors “printed” onto paper. I’m an early conceiver but an extremely late-adopter. I identify with the statement William Gibson made when I heard him read from his novel All Tomorrow’s Parties at my neighbourhood bookstore in Los Feliz in 1999. He’s ambivalent about owning technological objects, he said, and he’d only just opened an e-mail account because he only wanted to e-mail when even dogs and children could.

I want to make electronic / paper books when the components can be easily pulled together from the hardware store (where I bought most of my bookbinding supplies), in a world where the standards are no more complex than A4 or A3, smooth or shiny, b&w or color and there’s no problem with backwards continuity or disruptive standards making something obsolete. Many pages rather than a single screen is my guiding principle. It doesn’t matter to me if these are electronic or paper pages or a combination of both, only that a sequence of thoughts is available, the journey to an idea rather than just the destination.

Amazon.com’s newly released electronic-book reader, Kindle, is expensive and has many of the limitations of Sony’s book reader, and it’s ugly. However, it has vastly more titles available to download than Sony’s and the ease of Amazon’s one-click purchase system that loads titles wirelessly into the Kindle. It represents a move towards the mainstream and making the concept of a bookreader something less specialist, even ordinary. My heart is warmed by its release, a little.

Not A Blog

My tendency is for coolness, distance, and an impersonal tone to my stories that’s the antithesis of blogging. It’s the second thought of the edited draft not the first words of a conversation that interest me in recording my impressions. And while I maintain a few blogs, on bookbinding, electronic paper materials research, mythology and Australian food production and agriculture, I couldn’t find my “voice” because I needed the posts to look like they were published in a newspaper. I wanted everything to appear as if it were published in the International Herald Tribune.

All has changed with a new WordPress blog design template called The Journalist.