Monthly Archives: September 2011

Transitioning From Working in an Office to Working From Home

There are many dif­fer­ent adjust­ments required when you move from work­ing in an office for someone else to work­ing from home by your­self. For me, one of the chal­lenges has been schedul­ing time to catch up with people.  While work­ing at Microsoft as an evan­gel­ist, part of my job involved meet­ing up with people, grabbing …

September 29, 2011 – 14:47 | By martha | Posted in Personal | Tagged , | Comments (1)

Tuesday Newsday: The Irish Newspaper Edition

A few weeks ago, I did an ana­lysis of some world­wide news source apps and web­sites, one of which was The Irish Times. Appar­ently many people had not seen The Irish Times’ iOS app and I received a lot of feed­back from people on the blog, on Twit­ter and in per­son express­ing dis­ap­point­ment and, in …

September 27, 2011 – 14:42 | By martha | Posted in News/Magazines | Tagged , , | Comments Off

Tuesday Newsday: Pay walls, Freemium, Business Class – What Works?

There’s back­lash against pay walls, drop­ping ad rates, and a ser­i­ous amount of com­pet­i­tion for viewer eye­balls.  How should online pub­lish­ers nav­ig­ate the world of pay walls and premium con­tent, whether we’re talk­ing about tab­let pub­lic­a­tions or web pub­lic­a­tions? Will people pay for con­tent? Espe­cially given that there is so much avail­able for free? To invest­ig­ate …

September 20, 2011 – 21:05 | By martha | Posted in News/Magazines | Tagged , , | Comments (1)

An Introduction to Treesaver

In my Con­tent Strategy Forum work­shop, we cre­ated a short, online magazine called The CS Forum Times.  The magazine used Treesaver to quickly lay­out the art­icles and images and make them work well on a vari­ety of browsers and devices.  This is an over­view of how we built The CS Forum Times and how you …

September 20, 2011 – 01:21 | By martha | Posted in Technology | Tagged , , , , | Comments (2)

CS Forum 2011 :: My Workshop Slides & Content

Last week I delivered a half-day work­shop at Con­tent Strategy 2011 Lon­don on Design­ing Nar­rat­ive Con­tent.  We covered top­ics like what makes nar­rat­ive con­tent effect­ive versus use­less, how to optim­ise work­flow for nar­rat­ive con­tent, and tech­no­logy options for nar­rat­ive con­tent.  The slides are below. Dur­ing the last sec­tion of the work­shop we cre­ated our own, short, …

September 14, 2011 – 14:56 | By martha | Posted in Speaking | Tagged , , , | Comments (2)

Tuesday Newsday: Two Approaches to Magazine Apps

Today I’m look­ing at two lit­er­ary insti­tu­tions and how they approached their app ver­sions: The New Yorker and McSweeney’s.  I call both of them insti­tu­tions because, while I know the New Yorker has been around far, far longer, both have grown from pub­lish­ing reg­u­lar col­lec­tions of excel­lent writ­ing to well-known pub­lish­ing houses with large, fer­vent …

September 13, 2011 – 15:33 | By martha | Posted in News/Magazines | Tagged , , | Comments Off

Free eBooks, Audiobooks and More, Courtesy of Your Local Library

I’ve explained how to do this to so many people that I thought it was worth writ­ing a blog post about it. For sev­eral months, I’ve been enjoy­ing down­load­ing free audio and eBooks from the Dun Laog­haire lib­rary web­site.  A friend of mine told me about this in the US earlier this year, and I …

September 12, 2011 – 12:16 | By martha | Posted in Technology | Tagged , | Comments Off

Tuesday Newsday: Long-Form Content Apps

I have focused on many apps and sites with a wide vari­ety of con­tent. Things like news­pa­per sites and mul­ti­me­dia magazines. Today we’re cov­er­ing two apps which focus on doing one thing and doing it well: present­ing long-form read­ing.  The Atav­ist and Pal­impsest have cre­ated ideal envir­on­ments for read­ing both magazine art­icles and non­fic­tion stor­ies. …

September 8, 2011 – 23:06 | By martha | Posted in News/Magazines | Tagged , | Comments Off