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4.6.07

Web publishing has changed 

I went browsing through the old Lucire Newsstand pages on our website (listing an index of competitors and related sites) earlier today after being emailed by Dylan Crawshaw at Cheek.
   Cheek is now listed, but as I surfed, I realized how much of Web 1·0 had gone. The numerous hobbyist sites and many older ones that started the same time did, in the mid-1990s. A lot of professional sites have turned into , while others have just simply vanished due to the changing situations.
   All told, I must have removed two dozen from the index. It’s a solemn reminder that not everyone is lucky in continuing , even in a low-cost medium like the web. It confirms that I probably made the right decision back in 2003 to add a print component to Lucire, even if internal issues kept us from having the swishest website in 2005 and early 2006.
   Since those Newsstand pages hadn’t really been touched since late 2005, a lot of the changes must have happened as blogs and mainstreamed—which means that not only need to adjust to the 21st century, but also who began in the first wave of the internet.
   What is apparent is that the audience continues to into smaller pieces, while the giants, serving everyday entertainment and enquiries, seem to be getting bigger still—the top sites being the Googles and YouTubes of this world. sites can only fight for the smaller shares—or seize upon something to make them appealing to a larger audience.
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Comments:
i'm still here!

but seriously though, it's true. these changes have been felt through all levels no matter of what medium you are examining.  
True. Is that Mark as in Markoos?  
You're right Jack, things have changed. Years ago I published a webzine that, if I remember correctly, you rather liked - eMale.
The technology was terrible - I made every single page by hand using a truly awful program called Net Objects Fusion. The site had hundreds of pages. If I made a change to one page I had to republish the entire site - with a dialup connection. At its peak it attracted 30,000 unique visitors a month. It never made a bean.
Today the ease with which one can blog is truly remarkable. I have just helped a friend - an estate agent - set hers up to share her expertise about properties in her area (hey, if it can work for a Saville Row tailor...who knows?)
eMale was closed when I joined Lion Nathan's IT company as creative director. It never made me a bean, but it taught me a great deal.
You comment about building an audience is interesting. I wonder whether what we used to call fragmentation still has the pejorative implication it once did? Better to have a compact audience that is truly interested in what you have to say than waste resources spoiling the enjoyment of your favourite TV show. Magazine have always adhered to this model. We love the magazines that are more relevant to us and which might differ in very subtle ways from their competition - Black is ostensibly similar but quite different from Lucire. You don't have to be a member of the magazine cognoscenti to understand the cues - they are inherent - a priori.
It should matter less to an advertiser whether their message is exposed to a million plus readership if that reader base is filled with people who don't find what you have to say interesting. The much vaunted Long tail embraces this view.
Anyway, always find your material interesting - stand by for the revival of eMale in a new format with a new brand that I hope will be interesting.
By the way, check out Viv magazine - distributed only via the Zinio reader. Very well done, I could imagine Lucire as an excellent candidate for something similar - esp if you were to re-purpose content for niche markets like the Middle East or Thailand... just thinking out loud.  
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Entries from 2006 to the end of 2009 were done on the Blogger service. As of January 1, 2010, this blog has shifted to a Wordpress installation, with the latest posts here.
   With Blogger ceasing to support FTP publishing on May 1, I have decided to turn these older pages in to an archive, so you will no longer be able to enter comments. However, you can comment on entries posted after January 1, 2010.


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