Tag: PUBLISHING

DDoS attacks aren't entirely uncommon nowadays, but the scale of the attack against WordPress.com is truly staggering. CEO Matt Mullenweg told TechCrunch that the attack has affected all three of the company's data centers -- which are located in Chicago, Dallas, and San Antonio. The sites were being blasted by tens of millions of packets (and multiple Gigabits) per second. Mullenweg says the ...

Google, in a move that shatters any lingering questions about whether it has been building a digital newsstand for Android, has just announced One Pass. The new system aims to give publishers a simple way to let consumers pay for content and then access it across a number of different platforms, with Google Checkout providing the payment backend. We strongly suspect those might include native ...

It used to be that when you wrote a book, you just sent your manuscript off to a bunch of publishers, and waited. Or if you were lucky, rich, or connected, maybe you had an agent who could help you and pitch the publishers for you. Today, it no longer has to be like that. Authonomy is one website that aims to change the process -- and do it in style. HarperCollins is effectively using the site to ...

Blurb, the king of self-published coffee table books, has just launched a new Web-based tool: Bookify. The downloadable desktop app Blurb BookSmart still exists -- and it's still the preferred tool for complex book layouts -- but for speed, ease of use and convenience, Bookify is now the thing to use. The road to glossy, self-published narcissism begins by simply selecting the size and shape ...

Released today, a new report from Pew Internet elucidates just how unwilling we are to pay for online news. In the State of the News Media 2010 report, Pew finds that while 71% of Internet users read their news online only 7% of all users would pay for the privilege. To put things into perspective, the report also notes that the total online advertising revenue dropped for the first time since ...

Considering that you're currently online and reading news, you probably won't be shocked to hear that websites are now officially more popular than newspapers as a source of news in the U.S. That puts the Internet in third place for news, behind local TV stations and national television networks according to a study from Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project. TV news still ...

Build it and they will come... Build it and they will come! Holy feces, folks, get this: people are paying for downloadable content. Yes, stick this in your pipe and smoke it, Mr. MPAA/RIAA/ESA -- Valve's numero uno digital content distribution software, Steam, now has over 25 million active users. Those 25 million users managed a peak concurrency of 2.5 million games players, racking up ...

You'd think that Google's purchase of FeedBurner a few years back would have meant that FeedBurner stats would be easy to track in Google Analytics. No such luck so far, but Analytics can now track at least some FeedBurner info, although the process isn't very obvious. If you want to see how many people click through from your FeedBurner feed to your site (no subscriber numbers yet - sorry!) ...

I have to admit, I'm pretty envious of kids today, because they get to play with fun stuff like Storybird. Storybird is a place for kids and parents to read and create storybooks. It's completely kid-friendly and features a gallery of great artwork that you can use to get started. Just because Storybird is targeted at children doesn't mean it's dumbed-down, though. A lot of adults I know couldn't ...

Dinky Page is a lightweight web page editor and hosting service, ideal for creating example pages or quickly hosting some information you need to share. If you have something to put up on the fly, and you need an HTML page, but not an entire blog, Dinky Page might be the perfect solution. You'll have to host your images and videos somewhere else, but that's not a big problem when people ...

Do you have a blog? Does it have a working RSS feed? Congratulations! You can now publish your blog on Amazon's Kindle platform, allowing users of the Kindle device (or the Kindle iPhone app) to subscribe to your blog for a small fee. You take a 30% cut, and Amazon takes the rest. It might be small potatoes, but more blogger-generated content could attract more users to the Kindle platform, ...

The Moveable Type folks at Six Apart have officially released the cross-platform publishing package they announced late last year. It's called Motion, and it's available to Movable Type Pro users now. Motion lets you publish to multiple services at once, and it allows your community members to comment using their existing accounts on Google, Yahoo and Facebook. You can quick-publish a microblog ...

Document-sharing site Scribd and online self-publishing service Lulu have teamed up to offer Lulu's free ebooks in Scribd's iPaper format. iPaper is designed to be a versatile cross-platform means of displaying different document types online. Key draws include the ability to embed docs in any webpage, including your manuscript in Scribd's library, and adding ads to your document. Lulu is a ...

If you ever had the dream of being the editor of your own magazine but lacked the experience, network and the monetary investments to get it off the ground don't give up yet. MagCloud hopes that with its services you can be the next publishing mogul. While currently in beta, MagCloud claims that the process is easy enough. Create your magazine according to their specifications and upload it ...

In the early days of the web, before high-fallutin' content-management systems, document control, and database-driven blogs, web authors were for the most part forced to stage their content in a clumsy, time-consuming way. Manually uploading and resizing graphics and hand-writing HTML in an early web editor like "HotDog" or "HotMetal" (remember those?) was how we all did our first web authoring, ...