So here’s something: I have a new job. And a new ebook out. The two might be connected.

The job: The image above might be a clue. Yes, from this coming Monday, I will be the Books Editor of The Huffington Post.

I’m excited. I’ve never worked full time for a major brand before. This one is, unusually in this climate, both ambitious and expanding. There’s some fascinating things that can be done in the area of online reporting and aggregation. I hope, nay expect, to be doing some of them. Give me a few weeks to get used to things, but watch this space.

The book: Somewhat fortuitously, this morning my new ebook, Reading in Four Dimensions, went live on Kindle (here’s the UK link) and Nook. People can read it via pretty much any device via the free Kindle and Nook apps.

The book – well, long essay really – looks at how the physical and digital worlds interact through the medium of storytelling. It’s an explanation of social reading, and why it’s going to change publishing. It’s a story about time travel. And it’s only 99c (or its equivalent in your territory.) There’s also a page of related links.

If you’d like to know more, below are a few Probably Asked Questions.

PAQs

Q: Why did you take this job?
A: Because it’s a genuinely exciting company. Because I think I can do something fantastic with the role – editors get a lot of editorial independence within their sections, which means I’ll stand or fall on what I do with it. And I have plenty of ideas for what I’m going to do with it.

Also, I’m excited by their frankly immense readership figures, their current ambitions, and about being a tiny part of a major news operation. This is going to be fun.

Q: Aren’t you the magazine guy? What do you know about books?
A: Certainly, I have more experience and contacts within the global magazine industry than I do in the books industry.

I do have some experience with book publishing, as an author and a former Editorial Director of a publishing company that made books among other products; Reading in Four Dimensions was written following three months working at Brown University on a lecture and workshop series about the future of the book, and I’ve also been following book industry news for some time among my RSS and Twitter feeds, as part of my ongoing fascination with new and unusual storytelling.

However, it was made clear to me that I was hired for my editorial vision, rather than my insider contacts. This does mean that I have some catching up to do in getting to know all the relevant people, but I have a feeling that the HP name will help me get my phone calls returned.

Q: Will you keep running Stack America and Colophon?
Yes indeed. You’d have to pry those from my cold, dead hands.

Q: What’s going to happen to this blog?
More exciting news: I’m going to be cross-posting magazine blogposts between here and The Huffington Post. This means, a) the blog is about to come back in a big way, and b) yes, my pretties, these reviews, rants and witters are getting a mainstream audience. Bonus points for readers who click on both versions.

Q: What does Reading in Four Dimensions have to do with the new job?
I wrote the first draft in April, based on a talk I gave at Brown University in early March. It probably helped me get the job, but otherwise the timing of its publication is a rather happy accident. It wasn’t intended as a manifesto to the books industry as declaimed by the new Books Editor of The Huffington Post, but there you go.

Q: I’m a book industry PR/have written a book I think you should feature/want to tell you some industry gossip. Can I email you?
Not right now. My first day is this coming Monday, much of which will probably be spent meeting people, learning where to store my umbrella, and trying to remember the location of the restroom.

Basically, if you already have a contact email address for the Books section at HP, stick with that until further notice. If you don’t, find one, and use it. Insider tip: annoying me at my personal email address doesn’t increase the likelihood of favorable coverage.

Q: I don’t like The Huffington Post.
A: That isn’t a question. But keep an eye on the Books section anyway. You might just learn something interesting.

Here we go again.

Some news I’ve not seen reported anywhere in English: a Spanish website called Youkioske.com (“Probably the best website for reading online”) was ordered by a judge in Alicante last week to remove certain publications made by Hearst and Conde Nast from its site, and to remove the metatags “Cosmopolitan” and “Vogue” from their code.

The site reminds me of the early days of Mygazines.

Firstly, they’re also owned by an anonymous company (MilPorMil Limited, or “1000×1000″) seemingly based in an offshore location (their address is listed as “Group Floor Blake Building, Corner of Eyre and Hutson Street, Belize City, BELIZE” – perhaps a misspelling of “Ground Floor, Blake Building”, which is where a few offshore registration companies seem to be based. Here’s one, offering incorporation and a Belize mailing address for 500 euros.)

Also, though not publishers themselves, they, like the early Mygazines before them, seem to provide readable versions of PDFs of publications that have been uploaded by users, who receive “karma points” for their trouble (not redeemable at any newsstand). The publications are then all viewable for free, displayed in this case not within a bespoke reader but via the Issuu platform.

It seems that the site has been running for more than a year, though I hadn’t come across it before. At least some of the PDFs contain watermarks that show that they have come from an equally evasive magazine piracy site called Store Mags (NSFW, contains many porn scans). Here’s the vaguely amusing Store Mags disclaimer:

MilPorMil Ltd, who also own the currently-inactive URLs “Peliculasver.com” (transl: “movie watching”), “reenvio.net” (transl: “re-send” or “forwarding”) and “desfacebook.com” (transl: “un-Facebook”), make it clear in their press release about the case that they haven’t been ordered to close down completely, that their model is not based on piracy, and that the essence of their site is merely to provide links to other websites where the content is viewable.

They also state that it is absolutely in their interest that no copyright infringement occurs on their site, that they actively prevent any links to it, and that they don’t host any content at all. (That might, technically at least, be the case – it’s not clear where the PDFs that people upload are actually hosted.)

They also state, as Mygazines once did, that many of the magazines are included with publishers’ permission, and all a copyright holder needs to do is contact them, and they’ll remove all illegal content within 48 hours.

Currently listed on the site are such publications as Art Review, Juxtapoz and Computer Arts Projects. Computer Arts Projects and Juxtapoz sell their digital issues on Zinio, and Art Review only offers free digital editions to registered members. None of the publications I’ve seen on the site links to Youkioske.com as a place to read their magazines online. I’m happy to be proven wrong, but though I have no idea if they’ve broken any laws in Spain or Belize, not all seems to be copyright kosher – as the Youkioske logo itself kind of suggests.

None of this is a surprise. I said back in 2008 that Mygazines was merely the start of things to come. Magazine torrents are around, and on tablets – a technological missing link that’s arrived since those early days of Mygazines, which I should stress is now a legit software vendor – PDFs are now more comfortable reading than ever.

Whether or not magazines are losing, or will lose revenue due to piracy is a debatable point – just as it is with movies, music and books. It’s just interesting, and unsurprising, to see magazines increasingly being drawn into the discussion. As tablets grow in popularity, so will these kinds of stories.

By now, you may have caught up with my widely-tweeted article at the Hospital Club on the “failure” of tablet magazines, aka (by me at least) “maglets”. If not, it’s here.

I don’t have much to add to the topic right now, other than to say Adam of Exact Editions tries to cheer me up by refuting my points, and that the latest move today by Apple to add subscriptions isn’t quite what the industry has been waiting for. Oh Steve, you are a tease. The reader might not care about the finer points of this, but you can bet that the publishers do.

The headline problem is the legal obligation to offer the same subscription deal on iTunes as they do anywhere else.

Two issues with this requirement. Firstly, many mainstream magazines currently have hugely complex discounted subscription contracts with numerous sources, most of whose value is based on two things: being able to deliver the subscribers’ data to advertisers – either as demographics or mailing addresses, depending on which boxes were ticked; and on automatic renewals at a higher rate than hugely discounted “new subscriber” offers.

The thought of paying Apple 30% of all of that – almost certainly far higher than the other contracts are worth – without getting any of the subscriber data out of the deal, might make a few publishing execs turn a little pale. It also forces them to be up front about the discounting that goes on, and to simplify it hugely.

Secondly, who is to say that an iPad edition is identical to one on Android? Or one on a Windows 7 phone? What happens if Time offers a year’s subscription with every Motorola phone, or National Geographic wants to do a deal with Verizon to bribe new iPhone customers? How far does the “same deal” requirement stretch? How that will be policed is going to be tricky – and maybe end up in the courts.

Possible consequences?

• Some of the industry pulls out of the iPad (Time is doing this already. As a rule, though, I’d say it’s only likely if another big player enters the tablet market and undercuts Apple significantly on price without compromising quality. Could happen);

• The industry succeeds in getting Apple to backtrack on the deal (out of Steve’s cold, dead hands – unless the above scenario plays out soon);

• The price of magazine subscriptions in the USA is standardized, and goes up noticeably to overcome the transactional losses that come from forced standardization (would create a societal shift, and probably hasten the decline of mainstream print – though that might not be a bad thing, as it would increase the perceived value of some titles, at the expense of the headline circulation figures);

• The mainstream magazine industry bets the house on the iPad, and Steve gets what Steve wants (likely for a few publishers, but not most);

• The industry sticks to an HTML 5 app standard, allowing them to sell across multiple platforms, and accepts that they make less on the Apple devices than anywhere else (probably the way it’ll go for a while – until the next thing comes along);

• Magazine subscription houses start to fade away (and about time too).

UPDATE: Google responds, and responds hard. The industry may be battling Google on syndication and advertising, but it can’t argue with this.

Though I am a subscriber, I can usually take or leave Wired US. Each year, there’s a few good articles and some interesting design choices, but overall it has an unnecessary love of celebrity, and each issue never really hangs together as a package. The front sections in particular are very uneven.

That’s not the case, however, with the latest issue: The Underworld Exposed.

It takes its regular features and subverts them in interesting thematic ways. The piece about “what’s inside a product you know” is about street heroin; their How To is “How To Ship Coke”; the Test page is about knockoff versions of famous products.

The main features are about the small Romanian town at the centre of European internet scams, the value of illegal human organ trafficking, and people who break lottery codes in order to launder money. The text never tries to moralize. It’s surprisingly bold stuff.

It often feels like an issue of mid-1990s Colors, with a bit of VICE thrown in. Which, in my book, is a very good thing.

I really enjoyed the design of this infographic spread about New York sex workers – nothing stereotypical, no fake neon or tittersome burlesque design. Just straightforward facts, letting the banality of reality speak for itself.

Still not sure about some of the design decisions – the layout of Ricky Jay’s superb collection of historical criminals is a little awkward, for example, and as so often happens with Wired, the cover feels like an overly researched missed opportunity – but overall, this is an unusually focused and engaging issue.

Definitely worth picking up or buying on your iPad.

You know the one. So what’s it like?

One-line pitch
According to the press release, The Daily “gives readers everywhere the engaging experience of a magazine combined with the need-to-know content of a newspaper and the immediacy of the internet.”

NB Everywhere is defined at time of writing as “everywhere that people use the US iTunes store”.

Made by
A team of 100 or more apparently, including “top journalists, thought leaders and opinion makers”.

There’s certainly a breadth of experience: the Editor in Chief and Gossip Editor both came from the New York Post, the news editor from AOL via The New York Times news blog, the Sports ed from a New Jersey paper, the Opinions editor from Forbes via The Wall Street Journal, the Lifestyle/culture Ed from the New Yorker, the Tech Editor from Time magazine, and the Creative Director came from AOL Media.

The app itself has no masthead, but the top names are listed here.

Made for
Rupert Murdoch’s email to UK senior staff (none of whom can currently buy it if they don’t have a US credit card) says “audiences everywhere”. At the launch event, the editor in chief said it was a newspaper for “everyone”.

Navigation
The app opens with a short animation, a seven-note Intel-esque melody, then this loading screen. I’m not sure if they updated during the day, or there was a bug, but it reloaded today’s edition three times for me. Each time, you only get the spinning wheel, so you don’t know how long you’ll have to wait.

Once it loads (and every time it loads, regardless of if you were halfway through an article and switched briefly to another app), you see a “carousel” (aka cover flow) of the front pages of each feature. The images on the carousel are low-res jpegs that often look a bit sketchy. You get the category of the article, but that’s all – so you have to rely on the headlines to guess what each one is about. It also marks which features you have read.

There is also a table of contents, but it only lists a few select articles, and feels like an afterthought to accompany the entirely unnecessary “how to use” directions.

There are six topics – News, Gossip, Opinion, ARts&Life, Apps&Games, Sports – and they appear in that order. There’s no customization options to change the order, or to open each day with your favourite section.

The bottom line of Carousel buttons, which you tap to reveal and then slides out of view automatically after a few seconds, offers: a video short of “today’s highlights”, an audio version of the same thing that also animates the coverflow, a “fast forward” button to run through the coverflow images while pausing for a couple of seconds on each, a “skip to a random article you haven’t read yet” option, “my saved pages” (more on that below) and “settings”, which are options to customize local weather, your horoscope, breaking news alerts, and your account information. Can’t imagine why anyone would want to use the linear/static video or audio summaries – I’d expect them to be phased out within few months.

There’s also a top menu that is always visible, providing shortcuts to the front pages of each section, and a “scrubber” – when you touch it, mini versions of the pages appear, for you to tap and jump to a piece. It highlights in blue pieces you haven’t read yet, but otherwise the thumbnails are too small to be anything other than memory aids.

Longer articles are two-column in a serifed font, and most pages are image heavy except for the Opinion section. Pages are images, so you can’t copy/paste, change the type size or search for terms, and zooming has been disabled. Quote marks, by the way, alternate between straight and curly – deep inside my soul, a tiny subeditor is weeping.

There’s a sense of indecision regarding orientation – most pages can be viewed both in portrait or landscape, except in news articles where landscape is used for slideshows, and portrait for text. Even more confusingly, if you open an article that tells you to rotate for a photo slideshow, then flick through that slideshow, and finally return back to portrait, the app places you in the middle of the article, rather than back at the beginning. A bug, presumably – and not the only one in there.

There’s a similar confusion attached to the reading method. Most are on multiple pages (between one and three), with no up/down swiping to read on. Except for one article in the Apps&Games section, one in the Sports, and the table of contents containing How to Use instructions, where you are told to swipe vertically to read on. Odd.

Sometimes, exclusively branded videos are included in place of still images, and these can be full-screened without much fuss. Some are genuine exclusives, others made up of wire footage. There are a few interactive “push button to read caption” elements, very few web links, and some stories also feature Twitter feeds on topics or, in one instance, a celebrity’s own Twitter feed.

Each page (not article – so multi-page articles have different, unconnected comments pages) can be commented on in-app via text or by recording an audio comment (a neat option), or via email, Facebook or Twitter (though twice trying to login to Twitter on the app made it freeze each time). Only registered users can comment in the app itself, and it uses a “Report abuse” function to police the commentaries. No sign as yet of Daily editors engaging with the discussions.

Facebook/Twitter/emailing a page created a bit.ly link to web editions of the pages, sometimes as text, sometimes as an image. Not sure why the difference – it might be a news deadlines vs other sections issue. The one time I tried it out, though, it sent a link to the wrong page.

Crash total during review period: five, plus one freeze.

Advertising
There’s 113 pages total, and I counted 11 ads. They’re mostly video-based, loading dynamically. Fox products feature heavily, requiring the user to rotate to landscape to watch trailers, plus Verizon, Pepsi, Macy’s, a neat Land Rover interactive ad, and Virgin Atlantic (their interactive ad from Project fits neatly here). Ads are not labelled as such anywhere, which could get problematic.

What’s inside
It’s a strange mix of content, and it doesn’t really hang together as a single entity, either in its writing or its design.

Each section has its own section front page, highlighting one or more stories.

The News section – 29 pages of the 113 – is very light, similar to the kind of thing you might read in Metro – one or two correspondents, but mostly a lot of wire rewrites. The videos are embedded in the pieces, and rather than enhance the stories, they just repeat the information in each article, in a cable-newsy way. It’s very irritating. Still, at least they don’t start up automatically.

For a brave new force in journalism, its coverage is incredibly limited. Issue one’s news totals, in order of presentation:

* two main stories (Egypt and American snowstorms) with ten pages and one video, and three pages and one video devoted to them respectively
* one non-time-sensitive, non-revealing, wonkish interview with Obama’s former budget director
* two “bizarre/frivolous short stories” pages
* a completely non-news fluff story, with a New York Post-ish headline, that occupies two pages, talking about a disco in New York that admits dogs
* a page with two stories: “Arizona places high tax on medical marijuana” and a two-paragraph story on “American woman pleads guilty to conspiracy to recruit terrorists”
* a very short story with a huge 360 panorama image on a proposed one-euro tourist tax in Venice
* a page with “the number of illegal immigrants in the USA has stabilized, but is still three times larger than in 1990″ and “Anna Chapman, sexy spy, trademarks her name”
* An image of a Japanese volcano spewing smoke
* a page containing “Putin turned on by brave pinups” (including photo of Russian girl in lingerie), a very short story about how American-made products were smuggled into Iran to build missiles, and a one paragraph story that opens with the line “Pump some iron, Gramps – you’ll live longer if you do”.
* A Daily exclusive short video in what seems to be a series labelled “Americana”, about how prisoners in a Louisiana jail make children’s toys. The 2:20 film is the visual equivalent of repeating that sentence over and over. It has no narrative structure, and tries to squeeze in far too many characters. It ends up saying nothing more than its opening statement.
* Biz Digest – Copper’s up, the trader Steve Cohen lost $23m, BP reported profits, and people are using smartphones a lot.
* The Daily reports that Allstate apologized for a report that ranked road users by their star signs. And then reprints the entire study with fancy (non-interactive) infographics anyway.
* Horoscopes and location-based weather.

So, no foreign news that doesn’t involve pretty pictures, and no depth or links on a couple of fascinating stories – “American companies caught smuggling to Iran” and “American woman tries to recruit radical Islamists to kill Swedish cartoonist”. Strange, all round.

Gossip gets seven pages, and leads with the unstory that quotes unnamed sources to reveal that “Natalie Portman has been talking to her friends about her pregnancy”, followed by typical Page Six-style shorts, a photo gallery of press shots that you have no option but to swipe through in order to get to the next page, a shock story that “Palm Beach socialites have never heard of Rhianna”, and then… an apparently exclusive story about how former Haitian dictator Baby Doc Duvalier has been hiding a chic Parisian apartment, with lover in tow, from his people.

Pardon? An investigative exclusive about a former dictator who is currently in the news, dropped in at the end of the Gossip section? Its placement suggests either a stunning lack of news judgement, or more likely, that each section head is fiercely protective of their own turf, and the editor doesn’t overrule to reassign stories to where they belong. Worrying.

Opinion‘s eleven pages open with a predictable “We are the world, We are The Daily, new times demand new journalism” piece that quotes American exceptionalism as the foundation of its foreign coverage (at least they’re up front about it) and claims no other particular political leanings. The news stories are so short and superficial, I certainly couldn’t contradict that claim.

This essay is followed by a remarkably intelligent, indepth, wordy piece about the connection between Bollywood and the rise in moderate Islamism. Yeah, you heard me.

Just as you continue to reel from the shock of your brain being forced into gear again, it pulls out a tech think piece about the rise in “ephemeralization”, then a quick piece on the situation in Egypt in Numbers (again, why not in the news section?), and a History page about the greater significance behind the launch of Voyager 1 (no links to the ace Voyager2 probe Twitter feed though). I spent more time reading these than the other sections put together. It feels like it belongs in a different publication.

Arts&Life gets 14 pages, in which it tells us to choose stripes, and shows catwalk shots to prove it, includes a few pages of style-related gossip (erm.. isn’t there a Gossip section elsewhere?), gives us love and male fashion advice, includes a Straight-Up taken for some reason in Mexico, and then suddenly leaps to intelligent movie summaries, including a three-page in-depth look at hipster spoof Portlandia. Strange to see Arts have so much style/fashion – it would probably go better with the gossip section.

Apps&Games gets 11 pages, and opens with “Last Minute Travel Apps” including iTunes store links, a non-critical blurb about the game Oregon Trail on Facebook (including a trailer and “tips”), a three-page interview with the founders of Quora (but no link to it), very well-programmed Sudoku and crossword puzzles that link to the Game Center (but no indications of difficulty), a one-page “What I have on my iPad” yawn, and one-paragraph shorts under the title “System_Update”.

Sports is perhaps the most content-intense section. It gets 26 pages in this issue, in which it covers American Football, basketball and ice hockey. There’s no way to skip to your favourite sport, so you have to go through it page by page.

It understandably goes big on the Super Bowl (though it’s still four days away), with videos about the atmosphere, columnists, plenty of in-line polls, some wacky shorts, and plenty of videos. Seems disappointing that the animated plays are only videos, not interactives. There is a tappable timeline about previous Superbowls, but the information is very brief and superficial.

Articles are brief, but expertly look at different aspects of their theme. Headlines appear on a black background, caps only, and the whole thing has a ESPNish feel to it. There’s also a “learn the tricks” basketball video, and a scrolling ticker of college basketball results on one page – though it looks as though that’s not actually live updated, just a gimmicky way to display the previous day’s scores.

There’s no single “results” page in the sports section, though there is an odds page for forthcoming games at the end. At least, I think that’s what “today’s line” means.

Summary
The Daily is very strange.

Firstly, the structure, and the design, feel very much like print. It is intended to be flicked through, every page of it, and the design and typesetting are as print as you can get without digging up a zombie Gutenberg.

The only non-printness of it all is its use of video, Twitter feed boxes (more than half of which are entirely superfluous, placed there because they can, not because they should), the occasional “tap here to read the caption” feature, a local weather display telling you what’s happening outside your window RIGHT NOW, and the limited ability to comment in/share pages – but these are added layers to what is clearly essentially a print product with bells on. There is no live reporting, no updated feeds from their correspondents, no new stories throughout the day. Nothing to make it feel “live” and digital.

This first issue feels like the product of competing personalities – half of it reads like an American-style Daily Mail in its approach (not its politics though), being deliberately and stereotypically female friendly in its gossip and fashion coverage.

It covers news lightly, without much insight or investigation, often leading with an image rather than a gripping story. This matches the formula of the designed-to-be-throwaway Metro, the Daily Mail, and the New York Post – all of which have far higher female readership percentages than the average newspaper.

And then there are the Opinion and Sports sections, which are densely packed with huge amounts of content, much of it on themes that are more traditionally male oriented. Men get depth, women get fluff, except of course for the “hot Russian spies/students in their lingerie” news stories. Is this really what journalism has come to?

The content and outlook of the six different sections suggest that The Daily is aiming to be a generalist news roundup-in-very-brief, for people of both sexes who somehow don’t get to read the news elsewhere. A breakfast read, let’s say, for those who want short, fast snippets to talk about at work. Almost like cable news, in fact, except that cable news already exists, and does it better.

Is the iPad market even mature enough yet to provide enough paying users who aren’t very connected to current affairs, in order to make money? As Joshua Benton at the Nieman Lab perceptively asks, Who is it trying to reach? What problem is it trying to solve? The Kindle, perhaps, might at a push have enough of an older demographic who want short summaries to support this venture. Does the iPad? Will the iPad?

And then there’s this: on the Bizarre/Frivolous News pages, four articles are linked to under the heading “What we’re reading”. The four stories are a video on BoingBoing coherently explaining Senate filibusters, an inside story from someone who went to Thailand for breast enhancement surgery, a fascinating and damning ProPublica investigation into nationwide coroner mismanagement, a long and interesting New Yorker profile of Guillermo del Toro, and a new study that shows how traffic cameras save lives. So, smart analysis, clever infographics, indepth reporting, a detailed arts profile… you’re reading it, but even with $30m at your disposal, you’re still not writing it.

At least, not yet. This is their much-delayed launch issue. Making a daily product is not easy, especially when your deadlines are shortened by the need to convert each page to be iPad ready. No launch issue is perfect, though it surprises me that they didn’t have a zinger of an exclusive to pull out, either in interactive graphics or investigative reporting, to showcase what can be done and to get their name out there even more. Maybe they’re saving it, to pull people in again post-launch. But right now, there’s not much exclusive or even interesting anywhere in this “pioneering digital venture.”

I’m going to follow its progress, and will absolutely post a revised review if it merits it in the future, when it’s had some time to bed in. As has been widely reported, there’s a lot of money behind The Daily, and Uncles Rupert M and Steve J have put the considerable weight of their names behind it, so they definitely won’t want it to fail.

But right now, it feels like it’s trying so hard to be all things to all men and women, frothy yet serious, fashionable and sporty – without having enough of any of the above to satisfy anyone. And most damning of all – its weakest section by far is the news.

For Wired UK‘s latest edition on privacy, they’ve created a handful of custom covers featuring detailed information about selected subscribers (presumably those with high-profile jobs in the media).

The information seems to have been hand-compiled from digital sources – Benjamin Cohen, for example, seems surprised to see his parents’ new address written on the cover, as well as the fact that he had coffee recently with his ex-boyfriend.

The fact that this information is all out there isn’t so unexpected – what’s more shocking is to see it in this context, written up and printed on the ostensibly public-facing magazine cover, under a famous masthead, all prepared by a group of strangers.

It’s a great idea – though of course not the first time that digital printing has been used to create personalized covers to make this point.

Right-leaning liberarian mag Reason did something similar with satellite images of subscribers’ houses seven years ago, back in the days before Google Maps made such privacy boundaries seem laughable.

And, four years ago, a kind-of-similar thing was also done by the American flavour of Wired, though it seems to have been a far more upbeat affair, designed to discuss ideas of personalized mapping.

The technology isn’t anything special, but when applied intelligently, seeing yourself and your information in an unexpected context associated with public display can give its message a lot of power. Information certainly isn’t what it used to be.  

UPDATE: Courtesy of Ben at Wired UK, here’s the cover they sent to Andy Coulson (oo, topical), and here’s the not-so-creepy newsstand version.

The Stranger nails it again with a great cover
Clever reuse of the political graphic of the moment

Prisoners write letters to magazines
Great story on how the art of letter writing isn’t dead

Hearst tries to apply analytics to magazine distribution
Somewhat shocking it isn’t already an industry standard

The best glossy covers of 2010
One more list, this time against blatant Photoshoppery

How to copy and paste DRM’d publications
Can we now just allow copy and paste across the board?

iPad readers don’t read at the same times as other readers
Unsurprisingly for a $500 piece of kit, they seem to prefer doing it at home – which has implications for what they’ll buy

Online interiors magazines thriving
Some interesting titles there

Light-up cereal boxes from CES
Next step, an issue of Esquire probably

Magazines that warped young minds
These looked like fun

Top publishers prepare to launch their own app store
Much better than making their own tablet, which is what they said the might do

Just completed a move, plus plenty going on here – so there’s a lot to catch up on. Deep breath now…

Which fonts do fashion magazine logos use?
Some actually useful information among the speculation

Longform publishes its Best of 2010 lists
Ladies and Gentlemen, start your Instapapers

Jeff Bridges redraws Esquire UK’s logo and masthead
Love the photo. Reminds me of this Vogue cover

Popular Mechanics, Esquire and Amazon: together at last
Or should that read “at least”?

Fray wants you to touch their junk
Good deal for back issues of this intelligent mag of The Moth/This American Life-esque tales edited by the co-founder of JPG

Foto8 has a great pre-Christmas offer on
Dear Santa, I’d like 25% off and an extra issue of probably the very best photojournalism mag out there, thanks

Japanese PDF photography magazine supplies soundtrack for iPad reading
They seem to go together nicely

Nolayout creates digital editions for independent publishers
Multimedia it ain’t, but straightforward JPEGs means no compatibility problems. Lovely simple clean interface too

Nieves brings zines to the iPhad
Not quite how Xerox intended, but you can’t fault the price or accessibility. While we’re on the subject…

Article has just started a blog about free magazines
Excellent stuff on there so far. Expect to see some of these appearing in envelopes of Stack America subscribers over the next year

New McSweeney’s arrives inside a head
It’s all about the presentation. *Love* the 40-inch scroll of fortunes

Fire & Knives is preparing a day of presentations
Sounds delicious

Who cares about age? V does
Fashion mag does an “age is beautiful” special, apparently Photoshops its cover star to remove wrinkles

Bonnier starts to release iPad-only mini publications
Jean’s new blog has the story – as it seems to have most stories lately. Follow his constantly excellent blogging taking place over at The Magaziner

Chrome’s Web Store contains some iPhone/iPad apps
The code’s rewritten, but the functionality is identical. If you’re looking for something mag-themed, you may want to start here. All of which suggests that the next Android/Chrome OS updates will be interesting. In summary: The Great Conjunction is getting closer

Marie Claire introduces video-heavy direction for its iPad app
Hot Studio is brought in to bring some pizzazz to the mag within Zinio’s distribution channel. And in case you were wondering why there haven’t been many iPad mag reviews on here yet, that’s because there are *things* happening behind the scenes. Big news afoot…

Zinesters share their NYC
If anyone knows how to make the most of a tiny budget…

Harper’s Bazaar in “we scratch advertisers’ backs” non-shocker
Surely this is the most open secret since the grassy knoll?

South African teen magazine uses creative commons licenses
But how easy do they make it for the content to be remixed?

New magazine launches for pole dancers
Simply tuck $10 into the waistband of your nearest newsagent

Playboy goes all Willy Wonka
I said Wonka

Magazero offers free magazines anywhere around the world
As in beer

Pop‘s editor in chief resigns
Since its relaunch, it’s been a great magazine, and a glorious physical object. Hope her departure doesn’t change things. Her first cover star, lest we forget, was teenage blogger Tavi Gevinson, who is now working on a magazine with Sassy founder Jane Pratt

Magazines help children buy cigarettes
Face recognition software hits a glitch

A last look at Interni‘s Russian edition
Recently closed by its publisher, there’s some great architecture and design spreads in that link to enjoy

1960s French magazine covers have a lot of cheek
Speaking of which…

BUTT towels are now on sale
The funniest thing I saw at this year’s NY Art Book Fair

Stranded is now digital! Available exclusively via the Zinio platform alongside side projects with similar budgets such as Rolling Stone, National Geographic, Esquire and The Economist, it’s a clean $5, all of which goes to the International Rescue Committee.

Zinio’s reader is available on iPhone, iPad, PC, Mac, Game & Watch, all LG front-load washing machines (not the 89T washer-dryer) and ZX Spectrum.

And you can buy the Zinio edition of Stranded here.

For the story behind Stranded, click here.