Re: Online magazines vs print

I'm very interested in this "online magazine" discussion. I find myself in
agreement with Mr. Nielsen. Observations from the design trenches:

* Magazine publishing clients often request "page flipper" applets that
closely replicate the offline experience. These, in my experience, don't
serve users well.
* These applets often embed the content away from crawlers, have poor
accessibility, and relegate the magazine content to a date-based or
TOC-based manual search strategy. Once the issues reach "archive" states
only very motivated users will search through them.
* Offering keyworded, searchable versions of all articles _as printed_ for
later retrieval gives articles longer life; allows them to be grouped by
different types of tags, findable by author, section, etc. The "per page as
printed" model serves the publisher as an online record, so lawyers tend to
like them.
* An IA that provides advertisers space to offer context-relevant offers
helps them adopt and celebrate the online version. Ad reps learn to sell
topic-contextual ads along with the print ads.
* Magazines often have a ready-made community of readers ripe for a social
media solution that allows them to discuss articles and topics.
* Publishers are great clients to have. They are skilled at creating
compelling content and good at meeting deadlines, understand the need to
keep a site fresh. 
* Publishers respond well to data that shows the online channel can extend
the life of their articles, and are quick to grasp the relevance of search
data and metrics like pageviews and visit length.

Would love to hear more from the eLearning side, Lisa. What do you think of
Nielsen's claim that in-depth learning doesn't work well on the web, but is
better served by powerpoints and printed material?

-Susan




Susan Price
[email protected]
http://firecatstudio.com

studio:  210-320-2391
mobile: 210-872-0445




On 7/21/08 11:02 AM, "Lisa Neal Gualtieri" <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi Hal,
> 
> This is one of my areas of expertise, after 6 years of working on eLearn
> Magazine. Online and print are different in many ways, including how poeple
> read them and the expectations people have in this age of everything being
> online and too little attention paid to quality indicators. How can I help
> you?
> 
> Lisa

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