Mygazines once more

I received an email on Sunday from Darren Budd, aka Mr Mygazines (no, not that one).

Mygazines, you’ll remember, was the magazine-sharing site that rubbed the industry up the wrong way last year, and led to a law suit (see blogs passim); it was primarily the creation of Budd (who for a while hid under the pseudonym “John Smith of Anguilla”) and an ex-Microsoft programmer called Yoav Schwartz. Following a settlement with the magazine industry, it relaunched as a copyright-friendly digital magazine solution, featuring social media and other options.

Anyway, subject of the email was “Hello. It’s been awhile” and it said that Budd would like a chat on the phone, because there have been “some interesting updates”.

So chat we did, on the record. And here’s what I learnt.

Firstly, Darren is no longer CEO of Mygazines. He stepped down “officially in April”, to be replaced by Yoav. He remains a consultant to the company, and is “still a Mygazines shareholder at this time”. He says he stepped down because the company was “going through some restructuring and chose to focus its efforts on a few opportunities. I felt stifled in my role as visionary, and so Yoav stepped in as CEO.”

As an aside, he mentioned that they also created Porngazines.com at the same time as Mygazines, a shortlived attempt to offer the same options to fans of the porn magazine industry as Mygazines did for the mainstream industry. The domain was officially owned by another fake name based in Anguilla; however, they soon closed down the site so they could concentrate on Mygazines.

Later on in the interview, Budd spoke a little more about his move, saying that he “believe[s] in creative thinking and quick execution. Yoav is better at seeing through a vision and making it slowly grow.” So far, so company politics – interesting for those who still see him as a hero in the war to make all information free / villain who should be strung up by his boots from the top of Conde Nast Towers (*delete as appropriate), not really hugely important in the bigger scheme of things, now that Mygazines is just another digital magazine provider, albeit one with some quite neat tricks in its toybox.

More interesting were his reflections on the potential of Mygazines technology as “a model that allows the searching, sharing and archiving of information by consumers,” beyond a mere magazine repository. Budd sees himself very much as a visionary, for whom Mygazines was a proof of concept for a form of information gathering that would be useful in other industries. Among the examples he gives is the pharmaceutical industry.

“What if the pharmaceutical companies put all of their flyers on a single site, with videos of their ads, safety instructions and so on. You could search for a particular kind of drug, save folders of your father’s medication, your mother’s medication, also search for a particular treatment, cut out electronic coupons for discounts and so on.

“Or what about a single website that contained all the instruction manuals for every product you own, in a single, easy searchable database? People want choice, they want information to be accessible, and archived on the web. This is something I feel passionate about.”

In other words, Budd has a clear vision of a future in which the infrastructure being created to serve the print industry becomes applicable in many more areas than just newspapers, magazines and b2b publications – and as a shareholder of Mygazines, Budd is unsurprisingly keen that his former company be at the forefront of that. He mentions a few times how the company could be “acquired by a big media company with the vision to make that happen.”

He certainly remains proud of what he built: “When we created Mygazines, there were a lot of different methods of reading and uploading digital magazines available. What we invented was a way to break magazines down page by page, and give the option to use those individual pages any way you pleased.”

In the end, I wasn’t very clear why exactly he’d wanted to talk. He said there were a few things about which he wanted the record set straight – so, for that record, he didn’t attend the Publishing Expo in New York because he was about to hand over the company reins to Yoav, and because there was a family illness. That record hereby also now has carved onto it that Budd sees Time Inc’s ‘make your own’ magazine Mine as having been influenced by Mygazines, as well as the make-your-own-emagazine-from-blogs site Printcasting, an idea he said he had in December last year. ” If imitation is a sign of flattery, you could say I’m very flattered,” he said.

He also wants it known that he’s a “constant creative force”, who can make projects happen – with or without a shell company in the Caribbean, I’m assuming. The next fruits of his creativity, “a project that will have a world impact” is in the post-funding development stages, and will be announced in three to six months. It doesn’t have anything to do with magazines.

My thoughts? He’s clearly a smart guy who had a vision, and though he pissed a few people off with how it was originally executed, the vision was much bigger than just “upload and give it out for free”. He still sees his vision as incomplete – and even though he isn’t directly involved any more, he wants it known that he is still thinking big for Mygazines.

I have no idea if he’s right about Mine or Printcasting – aggregation is, after all, an idea that’s been in the air since the early days of the semantic web and RSS. What Mygazines created clearly picked up on something that was, and still is in the air, namely the personal end of finding, archiving and accessing all manner of information via a user-friendly interface, and attempted to find a solution in its own way, rather than just copying what else was out there – which can only be good for the industry as a whole.

What’s most interesting perhaps, and he might just be right about, is that magazines may prove to be just a small part of the story.