Om Malik’s new Network uses PublicSquare, a new Webzine Platform

Categories: Social Media, Web ToolsPosted on April 14th, 2007

Om Malik has launched a new WebZine, Found and Read (online magazine of multiple authors) network for entrepreneurs. While this is a unique story among itself, I’m more interested in the Web Strategy and platform that has enabled this unique network to publish it’s own ideas.

If you don’t know about PublicSquare, it’s a unique content management system with blog like features and robust permissions and editing systems. It also has community based voting features which help to bubble the best stories up to the top of any webzine.

Om’s network isn’t the only customer, the famed User Experience and Information Architecture community uses PublicSquare to publish on Boxes and Arrows.

Unlike blogs (which quickly become UN-scalable for real webzines) Public Square let’s multiple contributors be authors, as well as support an editorial process (to keep the best quality being published). Perhaps one of the best features of this tool is that it has many more self-regulating tools so one person doesn’t take the brunt of the work –it’s more evenly distributed among the editors, authors and of course the community –a feature set that’s new to web publishing.

I was fortunate to have been introduced by web expert Kit Seeborg (now helping with PublicSquare) to the Founder and CEO Christina Wodtke this week,

“The site is to be by entrepreneurs for entrepreneuers. Om wants to let entrepreneurs tell their stories. He chose PublicSquare because it allows the audience to be active contributors, not just commenters.”

If your group, neighborhood, orginziation, customers, support staff, kick boxing class, hiking club, or any other group wants to start a community magazine (and monetize) you really should look at PublicSquare.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, April 14th, 2007 at 11:23 pm and is filed under Social Media, Web Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Thank you for your insights. I work for a university which is rushing headlong into selecting a blog application in order to address what seem more to me like a robust webzine type problem. Can you put a finer point on your observations that blogs become UN-scalable for real webzines. What are some of the typical problems, and how does PublisSquare address them? Even their most expensive plan claims to be able to support only “about 139,810 page views” per month. The site where we would like to launch the blog/zine already triples that as a loose collection of infrequently updated pages. This is a very large university system, with potentially many different content input streams. I have two public square accounts with which I am trying out proofs of concept. I apologize for asking what are perhaps obvious questions, but I have read through much of the documentation for PublicSquare as well as for Wordpress and some other blogging software. Can you point me to a resource (a case study would be ideal) that might help me to step in front of this moving train, before I allow my university to sign on to the wrong track?

Posted by ed on May 7th, 2007 at 12:30 pm

I can’t comment on Jerimiah’s insights so much, since I’m not inside his brain, but what *we* find is blog tools don’t scale to multiple authors and workflows. Pageview wise, we’re all the same. Just drop us a note and we can cover your bandwidth in a seperate agreement if it’s way higher than our plans. We are on engineyard, and can handle what you throw at us.

The question of scaling is found in what you alluded to in your comment “This is a very large university system, with potentially many different content input streams. ”

When Boxesandarrows was on Movabletype, we had four blogs to manage content, a wiki and a basecamp, as well as mailing lists. Now we have PublicSquare. When we had multi-authors, we had to create a new author with the name “joe smith and fred lise.” Authors and editors communicated via email, stories were lost, authors would occasionally write me asking if their sotry was every going to go live. Our managing editors HATED movabletype — not because it’s a bad tool, because it was the WRONG tool. Now everything is under one roof, and if an editor or author goes awol, we know, and we can reassign.

If CMS means conversation managmeent system, that’s what we are. We’re kind a wordpress/basecamp mashup, and if you have more than two people in your system, we are a better choice.

Our documentation sucks (I admit freely, and we are working to fix) so please email me if you have any questions. I’m happy to help. I can also give you more details on Boxes and Arrows’ experience, or give you contact for the editorial staff there.

Posted by Christina on May 9th, 2007 at 12:12 pm

[...] A six figure salary is pretty common for any median homeowner in the SF bay area. But for many, a six figure salary is still a benchmark into management. That’s why the ladders (a premiere recruiting site) helps employers and job seekers connect for a small fee. With the launch of Om’s recent entrepreneur webzine powered by PublicSquare has launched, I can see the need to connect with the highly qualified. [...]

Posted by Web Strategy by Jeremiah » GigaOm and The Ladders at SF on May 11th, 2007 at 3:19 pm