publication

I've been thinking about different publishing & distribution methods and as it often happens the conversation appears on a site or mail list around the same time. early in feb, the node-l (node-London) promo emails starting making the rounds of the net lists. it sounds like a great collective of grassroots, funded & professional new media organisations based in London. (read through the list of projects on their site!) initially I was thinking this would be great to have internationally or at least in Australia / New Zealand as well - node-b (brisbane), node-s (sydney), node-m (melbourne), node-a (auckland) or node-au (australia) & node-nz (new zealand). another section of their promo which caught my eye was the POD - print on demand. I followed the links and discovered the mute site is based on CiviCRM which is an offshoot of Drupal (basically it's Drupal with a nice installer and some extra custom themes). Drupal's my favourite CMS as anyone who knows me would know - this site is done in drupal. (finally upgraded to latest version, but haven't had time to add more features yet). anyway, the POD concept is quite cool. people could make their own custom pdfs. researchers could pdf their reference articles for research. endless possibilities. I might try out the 'save to pdf' feature. on the Stealth message board I frequent, Mark was talking about new concepts & suggestions for Stealth mag, so I posted the below message. there's heaps of other options but not sure if he's wanting to go the online publishing method. I think it would work well in conjunction with the print mag and he seems quite busy these days & it sounds like he has to do most of the work which would be quite a lot of work.

Finding my old bookmark files has made me nostalgic for the early computing days when everything was new and exciting and full of possibilities. One of my favourite magazines back in the early 90s was Mondo 2000. It was hard to get - only a few places in Brisbane stocked it, actually only two that I recall and even then it was occasional. By the time I got round to subscribing to the magazine it had finished being published and I lost my subscription renewal to the cause so to speak. At the time, it was cutting edge and the full gloss images and interviews with leading thinkers made it a great read. R.U. Sirius who was the editor of the mag has a podcast these days and can be found around mondoglobo.net. Here's a collection of links to mondo 2000 stuff:

mondo articles from the well (link updated : original link broken 25/09/2008 : http://www.well.com:70/1/Publications/MONDO )