A 'zine of your own

Had this post kicking around. Written last week, but never posted. Since I'm a little light on content for your Monday morning Moon Topples fix, here it is...


Ever read a magazine and thought to yourself, "Man, I wish this magazine was tailored only to my personal tastes and interests! I want to read more about [obscure folk act] and not about [successful boy band]. And why are there no articles about [soon-to-be-defunct indie artist] instead of [12-page fashion spread]? And why is this [rap artist] blathering on about [automatic weapons and love for grandmother]? There must be a better way!" But where you substituted the bracketed items for your own opinions?

Yeah, I didn't think so. But somebody thought you did.

While trolling the web, I came across a site called idiomag.com. Seems they're launching an online magazine in October which is customizable. It appears to be a music magazine, but that might just be the examples they give. And it might just be a well-designed RSS aggregator. Plus they call it Idio, which is just a letter from calling it "Idiot."

You log in and create a profile, rating interests and what-not. Whether you prefer acoustic stuff or metal. If you care about industry info or not.

Then the magazine "publishes," and you rate the articles you read, which has an effect on the info in your profile, making it either more or less likely you'll get another, simliar article in the future. Articles show up in spread format. There are some features for flipping pages, and the content of the 'zine gets organized along the bottom into different little thumbnail representations based on what you haven't read yet, what you've read but not rated, and stuff you're apparently done with, because you've done both.

The design looks pretty nice, but it's hard to tell what the experience will actually be like from the screencast they provide, narrated by a British woman who uses "we" a lot ("We update our profile...") which is kind of creepy. She also describes the layout as "sexy," and the difficulty of filling out a profile as "dead simple." The screencast spends most of its time on what it might be like to set up a profile on your own some day (oh, boy!), and might be a bit more compelling to folks who have never before filled out a form online.

And it seems to use things like your birthday to generate some of your content, which may or may not be a good idea. My mom is gonna be 59, and she just adores hardcore rap, trance, and grindcore. And when I was a teenager, I would have wanted to read mostly about classic rock. Maybe it's just their way of gathering more personal data from subscribers, and passing it off as important to the experience.

They don't say how often your content might update, what topics might be included, whether the content will be original to the magazine or not, or really any info about what they plan to publish outside of the examples in the screencast being about music. There's not even a sample article in the screencast. When it goes to the "live" page, its all "Lorem ipsum" Greek text. So maybe they're marketing to folks who just really like magazines for the sake of being magazines.

Still, it might be cool, and it's free, so I'll probably check it out when it launches in late October. If nothing else, maybe I can trash the real version here at [The Moon Topples].