FOLIO: Personalities -- The Blog People Page

Back when I was editor of PC World, creating a magazine that newsstand buyers and subscribers loved was one of the great pleasures of my job. It was also something of a dark art. There were plenty of signs we’d succeeded: issues flying off the stands, renewal rates staying healthy, high scores in the pricey reader surveys we conducted. But in the end, connecting the dots of reader satisfaction was difficult, and agonizingly slow.

(The closest I got to instant gratification, incidentally, was when I traveled on an airplane and happened to sit next to someone who was reading PC World. Rather than introducing myself, I’d peek out of one corner o More...

I can’t remember many–any?–examples of a popular service or piece of software changing so much all at once as Twitter is doing with its new redesign. (If you don’t have it yet, hold on: The company says it’ll be a few weeks until it completely replaces Old Twitter.) It brings elements other than words onto Twitter for the first time–photos, videos, and maps. It fundamentally changes the service’s interface, with a roomy, context-sensitive right panel that reminds me of Twitter for iPad. It dis More...

Sports Illustrated editor Terry McDonell has lately taken on a busy part-time second career: digital seer for the entire magazine industry. A few months ago, he was showing off a slick prototype of an SI designed for reading on tablet computers. And last Wednesday at Google’s I|O conference in San Francisco, McDonell strode on stage, joked that he might be the oldest person in the room, and then unveiled another digital reimagining of his magazine—one with all the visual splendor of dead-tree SI, plus rich media, personalization, community, feeds of the latest scores, and more.
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On Monday, I was in Austin, Texas for the South by Southwest Interactive conference. I sat in a crowded ballroom and watched representatives from Wired and Adobe talk about a concept digital-magazine version of Wired for tablets, iPhones and other gadgets. Then I hopped on a plane and headed to New York for Tuesday's Future of Publishing Summit, an invite-only gathering attended by a hundred executives from the magazine, newspaper and book industries. One of the sessions featured representatives from Adobe, once again showing off t More...

In the weeks leading up to Apple's launch of its tablet device Wednesday, a strange fairy tale started to gain currency. It cast the publishing business as a hapless Sleeping Beauty—and Apple CEO Steve Jobs as a Prince Charming who'd kiss the industry out of its slumber with a combination of hardware, software, and services that would instantly restore consumers' willingness to pay for quality content.

As I sat in the audience at the event, I slowly figured out that it wouldn't provide a ready-made happy ending for magazine publishers. Apple did reveal that the gizmo includes an e-book reader, iBooks—but as the name suggests, More...

From Barnes & Noble's promising nook to dark horses such as the EnTourage eDGe, a bevy of e-reader devices are about to take on Amazon.com's groundbreaking Kindle. They won't transform the way most folks read immediately, but they're a major step in the inevitable, ongoing digitization of nearly everything we're used to reading on on dead trees. As a reader of fat hardcover books I can't fit in my briefcase, I'm a Kindle fan who's excited about seeing Amazon get some compet More...

All around us, magazines are undergoing the futuristic process known as augmented reality. It started this past summer, when Popular Science worked with a company called Metaio to create a cover which, when held up to a computer's Webcam, appeared on-screen in a form that was half live video, half 3-D animation, with 3-D animated wind turbines that spun when the reader blew into the computer's microphone. (The whole extravaganza was sponsored by wind turbine maker GE.)

More recently, Real Simple announc More...