Need an online portfolio in a hurry? Not all of us have the time, energy, or skill to build something from scratch, or the resources to farm out the job to more capable hands. Happily, some great tools are available that make it a breeze to build a good-looking personal website without actually building much of anything at all. 

Something simple that looks good can serve as a placeholder - and you might end up liking the it enough to keep it around. Whether you need a basic resume page, a photo portfolio, or a springboard to your (or your brand's) profiles on sites like Twitter and Facebook, these sites get the job done quickly and easily - and free of charge. 

Fully Flexible and Socially Promiscuous: Flavors

Flavors has a lot in common with AOL-owned About.me, but the former was first and we've always been partial to it. Sign up for a free Flavors account and you'll get access to a social Swiss army knife's worth of webpage tools. It's dead simple to make an attractive site - particularly a sparse, modern one; less is more, after all. Add your essential info to a basic landing page and get to work tweaking the background image, fine-tuning the colors, fonts, and alignment, and you'll have a great looking result in no time.

If you spring for the premium version, you can mask the Flavors.me domain with a custom url and no one will be the wiser. Flavors connects to just about every social network we use (and some we don't), letting you display content from Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, and many more. Since the content dynamically loads on your new profile page, this is a great way to feature portfolio fodder like writing or photos that you can host externally (and easily). Cherry-pick your best work, publish it on a (less versatile) site like 500px, plug it into Flavors and voilà.

Eminently Searchable in a Snap: Google+

Google+ is the quick and dirtiest of the quick-and-dirty options. Want to fast-track your name to great SEO? Invest a little time sprucing up your profile page on the social platform crafted by the search king itself. Google tweaks its search secret sauce regularly, but you can bet that putting in the time to flesh out and maintain a Google+ profile page will pay off in search rankings. In our casual testing, we searched for a handful of folks we know, from both within and without our G+ circles, and a Google+ profile popped up in the top five results every time. (If you're one of the John Smiths of the world, well . . . good luck to you.)

Beyond its SEO advantage, Google+ is a pretty solid - if uninspiring - way to funnel people to your links and social accounts. The About section of a Google+ user page includes a tagline, an introduction section (your bio can go here) and a section dedicated to any links you didn't sneak into your introduction. But be sure to enable the "Profile discovery" option toward the bottom of the Google+ profile edit page (found just above the "Other profiles" link section) to allow search engines to index your G+ profile - that's how the magic happens. If you've got some kind of author page floating around out there on the web, Google+ would be happy to link up your profile with what you publish. You'll have to jump through a few hoops, but the result is a little pic of you that pops up next to your links in search. Photographers in particular will appreciate Google+'s attractive lightbox view and well-implemented photo sharing and organization features.

Social Data Infused with Style: Vizify

Vizify is the newest tool on this list, the least traditional, and definitely the most fun. If you're interested in an eye-catching, ultra-modern spin on a traditional landing page, this one will be right up your alley. Vizify is so new on the scene that you'll need to request an invite. But once you're in, it couldn't be simpler to set up. Choose which social networks you'd like Vizify's engine to cull data from, pick a flattering color scheme and you'll quickly be met with an elegant array of brightly-colored data nodes arranged into a web of personal info.

You can drill down and get as granular as you want, adding individual images from Instagram or highlighting your pithiest moment on Twitter, or just see what Vizify comes up with organically. It's untraditional, sure, but that's the point - all of the important stuff is there, from the links you want to highlight to your current position and location . . . it's just arranged more playfully than you might be used to.

Whether you want something flexible, practical or fun, between Flavors, Google+ and Vizify, there's likely an option here to inspire you to landing page greatness. Got a Web profile creator that didn't make this list? Let us know and we'll take it for a spin.

Last Friday I did a presentation at The Project [R]evolution conference in Auckland, New Zealand. I presented on a topic I've been writing a lot about recently: the reimagination of publishing. I haven't been this excited about innovation in Web publishing since the early, experimental days of blogging, when I started ReadWriteWeb circa 2002-03. In particular, three new products have captured my imagination: App.net, Medium and Branch. It's too early to tell if any of those three products will be successful, but I like them because they are doing something different - and as a result, shaking things up.

Although it's Web publishing that has fired up my neurons, I have also been tracking developments in digital books and magazines. I mentioned two iPad apps that have impressed me a lot over the past year: The Atavist and Citia. Neither aims to replace paper. The beauty of both The Atavist and Citia is that they complement traditional magazines and books (respectively).

The Atavist releases multimedia enhanced magazine stories for about $3 a pop. Citia creates digital versions of non-fiction books, using cards and stacks to condense each book into its essential ideas - a concept which fans of 1980s product HyperCard, for Apple Macintosh, will remember fondly.

Summarizing where I think digital magazines and books are going, I listed some of the key drivers. But note the fifth point: people still love paper magazines and books (this author included). The digital publishing products that fascinate me the most are ones that complement paper magazines and books - they don't aim to replace them.

Next I talked about the transition from the first big wave of Web publishing, which I characterized as the Geocities era of the mid to late 90s - to the latest wave of 2012 (App.net, Medium, Branch, Svbtle). The Clipart-addled Geocities was the third biggest website on the Web in 1999, its peak. Nowadays, Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress and Tumblr rule.

But things may be shaken up, again, if two of Twitter's founders and a bolshy Twitter competitor have anything to do with it. I've identified five reasons why Web publishing is undergoing a sea change (see presentation embedded below for all five).

What's intriguing about these new products isn't that they have a decent chance of becoming as massive as Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress or Tumblr. Indeed, I will be surprised if any of the new era become even half as popular. What's of most interest to me is that each of these new products is challenging the "old" guard (if you can call services born in the mid-to-late 2000s as old!).

App.net is a direct challenge to Twitter's business model - especially now that Twitter is in the midst of tightening access to its API. Medium is, in a way, trying to make a categorized Tumblr (in other words, make a better Tumblr). Branch is trying to reimagine discussions, which strikes at both Facebook and Twitter. Svbtle is encroaching on the terrain of Wordpress, with its elite blog network and minimalist design.

These are exciting times for Web publishers! Here is the whole of my presentation, via Slideshare:

Chronological and real-time consumption of content just doesn't work anymore. It's time for topic pages to add a layer of organization on top.

In last week's post, 5 Reasons Why Web Publishing is Changing (Again), we explained why online publishing is going through another sea change. One of those reasons was topical organization of content in services like Medium, the latest product from two of Twitter's founders. In Medium, which is currently in a semi-public beta, content is organized into pages. Each page, which Medium calls a "collection," is structured around a single topic, theme or event. Up till now, people have consumed content largely on a chronological basis: think Facebook, Twitter and blogs. Now services like Medium, along with the more established Pinterest, are attempting to change that. The time for topic pages has come.

Organizing Web content by topic or theme is not new. Over the past 8 or 9 years, tagging has been the most common method of creating structure online. So-called Web 2.0 companies like Delicious and Flickr built their entire businesses around user-generated tagging of content. For example, here is a Flickr page based around the tag "Golden Gate Bridge":

Although it's not an exact topic match, Medium currently has a collection entitled "Been There. Loved That." which includes a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge. Other photos in the collection include a Frank Gehry building in Chicago, Tuscany in Italy and The Grand Canal in Venice.

What makes Medium different from Flickr is that there appear to be set categories for users to put their content into. As Dave Winer noted when he first published a post on Medium: "Instead of adding a category to a post, you add a post to a category." Tagging in Flickr or Delicious is freeform - you can create a brand new tag and it doesn't even need to be a proper word. Medium's form of topic mapping is more structured.

The above Medium collection is based around a fairly broad theme - places you've been to and loved - but remember that Medium is a brand new service and so it doesn't have a lot of content at this point. Fast forward a couple of years and there may be dozens of photos and write-ups of the Golden Gate Bridge in Medium's database. We're projecting here, but it seems like a good bet that Medium's "collections" will become more narrow as its store of content gets larger, so there probably will be a Golden Gate Bridge collection at some point.

This also highlights another principle of topic-based organization: that a piece of content can live in more than one place. That photo of the Golden Gate Bridge only lives in one Medium collection right now (at least as far as we can tell, because there's very little navigation in Medium). But it could also be put into a collection called, for example, 'Great Bridges of the World'.

Why Topic Pages Haven't Become a Big Thing...Yet

Organizing pages of content by topic or theme isn't new - as we noted above, products like Flickr and Delicious popularized the concept. You could even argue that Yahoo's mid-90s directory started the whole trend.

But topic pages never reached their potential. That's because, up till now, publishing has been dominated by chronological organization. Three of the biggest services on the Web prove this:

1. Facebook, the world's largest social network, is mostly organized chronologically - according to who you've befriended or subscribed to. There are other content organization options, such as using lists and tweaking filters in your News Feed. But you generally don't go to Facebook.com and expect to see content organized by topic or theme.

2. Twitter, the world's leading real-time information network, is also largely chronological - based on who you follow. Hashtags are one way of organizing content around topics in Twitter, but it's very much a secondary form of organization.

3. Blogs, perhaps the defining product to come out of the Web 2.0 era, are still mostly read chronologically. That's despite repeated efforts by professional blogs to offer topic-based navigation and RSS feeds.

Will Medium & Pinterest Change How We Consume Content?

Medium is putting the emphasis on topic-based browsing, rather than chronological. But it's too early to tell whether it will change the way we consume content, on a mass scale. 

Perhaps we shouldn't be looking at an unproven, still nebulous product to show the value of topic pages. An existing product is much closer to proving that topic pages are the next big thing: Pinterest. The image focused social network has thousands of "boards" that are based around topics or themes. Boards aren't as structured as Medium's collections, but the content in them could easily be turned into topic pages. For example this Pinterest search result for Golden Gate Bridge.

However it happens, personally I'm convinced that topic pages are going to become ever more important in this unruly Web. There's simply too much content to consume nowadays, so the great challenge of online publishing is to organize it better. Topic pages are the solution.

See also: Why Topic Pages Haven't Worked For News Websites Yet

Top photo: Medium cupcakes, from the collection Launch Day.

We're witnessing another sea change in Web publishing. From Pinterest at the beginning of this year to the launch this week of a new product from two Twitter founders, Medium, 2012 has been a year where the norms of publishing are being challenged. It wasn't that long ago that Tumblr and Wordpress were the cutting edge of publishing. But there's a new edge and it's populated by the likes of Medium (a kind of categorized Tumblr), Branch (the sister site of Medium, for discussions), App.net (a microblogging platform) and Svbtle (an elite network of indie bloggers). In this post we identify five key drivers for this new wave of publishing services.

1. Publishing Is Getting More Casual

One thing that all of the four tools I mentioned above - Medium, Branch, App.net and Svbtle - have in common is that they make the publishing process less onerous. It's now less about composition (being a writer or blogger) and more about expressing your thoughts as simply as possible. Branch encourages you to "be casual" when adding your opinion to a discussion, while Medium wants to remove "the burden of becoming a blogger".

Not only is the type of content less formal now, the design is stripped back too. All of the latest web publishing tools have minimalist, in some cases almost naked, interfaces. A Svbtle post is basically just text, a custom logo for each author and a subtle splash of color.

The move to less formality isn't a new trend. Twitter kickstarted the communication-as-publishing revolution and Facebook became massive partly because it was so easy to post things to your profile. The new wave of publishing tools are simply taking this ease of publishing a step further.

2. The Web Is Moving From Pages to Streams

If content creation is less constrained now, so is the output. Web pages and blog posts are still being published, but this new wave of tools is looking for ways to deliver content in a more flexible way.

In a post entitled Stop Publishing Web Pages, veteran blogger Anil Dash declared that he wants "a clean, simple stream of my writing, organized by topic and sorted with the newest stuff on top."

This is where App.net could really shine. As Twitter is busy restricting access to its API and shutting down third party apps that use its stream of content, App.net is building itself into a platform to output and organize streams. That's partly why I'm bullish on App.net.

3. Topic Organization Is Finally Happening

This is essentially what Medium is attempting to do, with its "collections" - which are posts by various people organized by topic or theme. Old-time bloggers may remember topic mapping initiatives from the 2002-2003 era called K-Collector and The Topic Exchange. Those were early attempts to organize blog posts into topics. Unfortunately they never took off, but perhaps this is the time for topic-based structures to shine.

Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab, goes as far to say that topics usurp authorship:

"Topic triumphs over author. Medium doesn’t want you to read something because of who wrote it; Medium wants you to read something because of what it’s about. And because of the implicit promise that Medium = quality."

I think the voice of the author is still crucial. If anything, Medium, Branch and Svbtle are all elitist - because they restrict content creation according to who you are, not what you're interested in. However, the presentation of Medium's content is certainly organized topically. I think we'll see others, including Tumblr, follow this model. Content on the Social Web has become far too chaotic and it desparately needs organization.

4. Quality Is In Vogue

This one has been bubbling away for a while now, ever since some blogs became popular with a 'quantity over quality' focus (which is still happening) and then Demand Media and its ilk doubled down with that philosophy. As a result, the Web is awash with content - much of it poor quality. Medium is explicit about wanting to change this:

"Our philosophy is that quality begets quality, so we will grow Medium smartly, ensuring that our platform is valuable to everyone in this increasingly mobile, connected, and noisy world."

The same is true with Svbtle, which hand selects bloggers for its network.

5. Startups Are Searching For Non-Advertising Business Models

Finally, the new wave of publishing services are all seemingly anti-advertising. App.net even managed to raise $800,000 on the premise that it would never have ads. Instead it has a subscription model. It's unclear yet how Medium and Branch intend to make money.

This is an exciting time for Web publishing. Sure, there are lots of questions to be answered about the latest crop of publishing services. But it feels like there is experimentation happening again on the Web - which is a very positive sign.

See Also: How Online Reading Is Changing - And How to Cope!

Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone have been busy developing two new services, both of which were publicly launched this week by their incubator company The Obvious Corporation. Unfortunately, both products are read-only for most people right now. So first impressions will be muted - perhaps even mystified, since Medium has very little navigation. That said, Williams and Stone have an outstanding track record with Web publishing products, as co-creators of first Blogger.com and then Twitter. So let's see what they've cooked up.

The first launch was Branch, a kind of discussion forum that came out of private beta yesterday. Then today, Obvious Corp released a brand new publishing platform called Medium. In announcing Medium, Williams positioned it as the next evolution of Blogger.com - which was launched back in 1999 by Williams and Stone. Similarly, as a discussions focused product, Branch can be thought of as an extension to Twitter. The connections might not end there. What's most intriguing about Branch and Medium is that the two products may eventually intertwine, although Obvious is calling them "completely separate products" for now.

What Medium Is

Let's start with the newest product first. Medium is a blog publishing platform, where posts are organized by topic or theme into "collections." Collections can be "closed" (private) or "open" (public). To receive an invitation to join Medium, sign in using your Twitter ID.

On first use, it's not (ahem) obvious what Medium is. There is seemingly no way to navigate around collections, nor are there subscribe buttons - for anything, as far as we can see. However, Williams promises that this version of Medium is "just a sliver of what we’ve figured out." So we'll give them the benefit of the doubt at this early stage.

Medium is also currently just a read-only experience for most users, even if you register. "Posting is limited to a small invited list of friends and family," wrote Williams in his introductory post. They will be letting other registered users post soon - but when is unknown.

If we had to sum it up on first impression, Medium is like a categorized Tumblr. But without being able to post, it's difficult to get a proper sense of what Medium offers compared to Tumblr, Pinterest and other modern publishing platforms.

What Branch Is

Like Medium, Branch isn't completely public yet. If you register using your Twitter name, you're promised an invitation "soon."

Branch is easier to understand - it's basically a discussion forum, where someone posts a topic and others comment on it. For example this "branch" about women in tech:

You can start a discussion based on something you found on the Web, or an original thought. You then add people to the discussion via email or Twitter - so the discussion remains closed and you control who's in it. However you can choose to publish the branch publicly elsewhere, such as on Wordpress.

Will Medium and Branch Connect Together in Future?

Obvious Corp states that the two products are separate. However, the Branch Twitter team noted that "there's lots more to build, though, so we'll see where we end up."

One immediate feature that would make sense is the ability to post a branch onto Medium. For example, if there was a 'women in tech' collection in Medium, the branch above could be published there. But we'll see how this plays out.

Despite the two products being a read-only experience for the majority of us when we first encounter them, it's worth being patient given the success Williams and Stone have had with previous publishing innovations. Maybe Branch or Medium - or a combination of the two - will be the next Blogger or Twitter. It's too early to say, but let us know your first impressions in the comments.

It does all of this by analyzing the billions of page views it tracks anonymously across its whole user base. Parse.ly started as a feed reader for pros in 2009, and Dash expands its capabilities with predictive analytics for one's own site. The software gets a sense of what topics and stories are most important and whether they're trending up or down. That's a great thing for publishers. Is it good for readers? I can't wait to find out.

Online Omniscience

It's no secret that blogging is a game of page views. Without good analytics, blogging is all about watching, intuition and guesswork. After you've done some of that, you write some spaghetti posts, throw them at the wall and see what sticks. Dash gives publishers the motherlode of data about page views and how to get them. It shows them the past and the present of their site, and its ability to measure Web-wide trends offers a glimpse of the future.

Dash offers three tiers of services starting at $499 per month. The basic "Track" tier enables internal tracking of authors, topics, sections and referrals, as well as predictive analysis of trends and real-time site stats. Tier 2, "Plan," adds the Web-wide trend analysis, search and filtering within the analytics, customizable dashboards for editors and downloadable reports. The top tier, "Promote," measures shares and impact across the social Web, and it sends email alerts to editors and writers when something urgent comes up.

Installing Dash requires nothing more than dropping some JavaScript into the site's footer. That's enough to capture the traffic and put the dashboard to work.

A tool like Dash gives a site a huge advantage in the short term. While some sites putter along without this kind of detailed feedback, the ones who have it could dominate. The ability to see exactly which topics and events need covering, and exactly how to cover them for a particular audience, is a sort of online omniscience.

Vision, Voice & Tactics

But hopefully, in the long term, this will lead to a new generation of content sites that all have these abilities. If every publisher could know its audience this well, there would be no more spaghetti-against-the-wall, side-boob-heavy, all-caps-headlines blogging tactics.

This week, Gawker is experimenting by letting writers go crazy with these old-school page view tricks, hopefully to prove the point that they aren't what the market really wants. But if all publishers had Dash or something like it, we'd all know that. Then the differences between sites would be all about editorial vision and voice, not just tactics.

It will be even clearer who's playing to the crowd and who stands out. Sites who just play the predictive analytics game will all start to look the same. But the gift of a tool like Dash is that it helps sites get to know their audience. It highlights the surprising things. The sites that stand out will be the ones who know their audience so well that they can consistently surprise them.

Parse.ly was co-founded by CEO Sachin Kamdar and CTO Andrew Montalenti and is based in New York City. Check them out at Parse.ly.

The new toolbar is a combination of the admin bar and the old Dashboard header. There's now support for drag-and-drop media uploads. The new dropdown menu has become a hover menu. WordPress has also added touch support for iPad. WordPress users who have felt frustrated over the co-editing experience will find this update especially satisfying. Now, the red bar that tells you if someone is editing the post will only pop up if another is actually in the post. The 3.3 version has also added a Tumblr importer so that users can quickly bring their Tumblr blog into the mix.

WordPress has been updating its platform a ton over the past six months. At the end of March, it announced WordAds, which helps hosted WordPress.com (not .org) blogs make money via ads. WordPress.com also added socially focused photo carousels, complete with notifications that looked a lot like Google+'s. WordPress added a follow button to its blogs, making it feel a bit more Tumblr-esque.

WordPress 3.2, which was released on July 4, has been downloaded 14 million times. The new version 3.3 is available for download now.

There are new ways to read, new ways to write and new ways to advertise. Publishing is a rapidly changing high-tech business now, so the tools change the content and vice versa. Established publishers have lots of inertia, so the changes won't sweep the world overnight, but here in the blogosphere, there's a palpable sense of excitement. Here's a tour of Web publishing's next level.

New Ways of Reading

Reading was the first thing that had to change before the business of Web publishing could change. Hardware, specifically smartphones and tablets, set the ball rolling. The tablet form factor has been on our minds for a while, but it wasn't until the iPad's capacitive touchscreen that tablets took off with consumers.

BBC.com conducted an interesting study of tablet users this year, which showed that the hands-on interface provides users with a sense of control. That's the key to making engaging tablet content.

Ten-inch tablets are a fine way to view a website, but new kinds of interfaces can better take advantage of the touchscreen (and lack of physical keyboard). That's why software companies have gotten out ahead of publishers in providing reading apps that can turn any content into tablet content.

Flipboard is a celebrated example, and it also just launched an iPhone version. It can pull any Web content into its pleasant, touch-controlled layout, and it also offers publishers enhanced options for Flipboard-optimized content. Many other Web companies have aped this model, the latest of which is Google. None of these apps has emerged as the answer, but the new Google Currents has some interesting advantages for publishers.

The other vision of tablet reading is the "content-shifting" model, best exemplified by Instapaper. Instead of simply viewing Web content through a new layout, Instapaper saves clean versions of Web pages on demand. When you click the Instapaper bookmarklet on an article, that article is synced to your Instapaper in a cleaned-up version containing only plain text and embedded media.

Unlike Flipboard and the like, there's no value-add for publishers here. Rather, Instapaper is, in a way, a competitor. If publishers want to make money off the content they host themselves, they have to make their own reading experience that's better.

New Ways of Writing

To match this new way of reading, publishers have to be bold. The iPad and the Kindle Fire both offer newsstands for publication apps, inviting media organizations to make in-depth tablet experiences, not just paperless magazines.

One of the best examples we've seen so far is The Guardian iPad Edition, which launched the same day as Apple's iOS 5 Newsstand. It sneaks the Web view in here and there, and it streams in some content, but much of the experience is native, giving the reader that sense of control that matters so much on the tablet.

But the new rules in publishing are empowering independent content creators, too. Social media have created a new class of publishing, in which content created by everyone gets stitched together into a narrative. But Storify has blurred the line again, turning social media into a full-fledged sense-making platform that can power a news site more like the ones we're used to.

The do-it-yourself publishing platforms have also become more powerful. It's a great time to be a WordPress publisher, because it's creating revenue streams for independent content creators and developers alike. And then there are next-generation tools like Jux, which has blown the notion of the blog wide open. Now anyone can make an eye-popping, full-screen, multimedia periodical that's fully touch-enabled and reformats to fit the desktop, the tablet or the smartphone as needed.

New Ways of Advertising

New publishing tools are great, but what publishing really needs is new business models. Yes, some legacy media companies are beginning to see real revenue from digital content, but the fact is that Web users have gotten comfortable with content being free. That means more ads.

Fortunately, things are looking up on that front, too. For one thing, thanks to WordPress and its partnership with Federated Media, ad revenue streams are now available to independent bloggers, not just mainstream sites. But there is also a whole new kind of advertisement on the horizon, one that takes advantage of the new hardware and the touchscreen sense of control. As devices get increasingly powerful, the limits on Web publishing fall away.

Disclosure: Federated Media is also RWW's advertising partner.

It lands in a somewhat crowded space occupied by offerings from Yahoo and AOL as well as from startups like Flipboard, Flud, Pulse and Zite, which was acquired by CNN earlier this year. Even before today's launch Google Currents was billed as a potential "Flipboard killer." After taking Google's new app for a spin, we're not convinced it poses a credible threat.

To be sure, Google Currents is a much more ideal way to consume written content from the Web on a tablet or smartphone. Its design is clean and to-the-point and the selection of content is virtually limitless.

A Decent - But Not Mindblowing - User Experience

When you first open up the app, it asks you to sign in with a Google account. Some may not be comfortable with this requirement, but we imagine that, in theory, it can help the app learn more about what content is best for you. As a bonus, it automatically pulls in your Google Reader feeds, which can add to your library of content one by one. Still, it would be nice if Google would let you use the app without logging in, or at least gave a clear explanation as to why doing so is required.

Once inside, you can browse content from a variety of pre-selected partners or search for just about any public RSS feed to add. We searched for one of our local alternative weekly newspapers, and sure enough Currents found all of the RSS feeds they publish.

Each publication has an "Add for free" button next to it, which suggests that charging for access to some content could be one way that Google and its publishing partners plan on monetizing the app in the future.

The article pages each have the sort of stripped-down, no frills layouts we've come to expect from this kind of application. Beyond that, there aren't too many bells and whistles here. While Google Currents offers a better user experience for reading content than a tablet's Web browser does, the standard for this kind of app has already been set pretty high.

Lackluster Social Features

Compared to its predecessors, the app is short on social integration. When you're reading an article, for example, hitting the share icon pulls up a menu with three options: +1, Email and "More." It's under "More" that you can find options like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Instapaper. In other words, all the most beloved social services the Web has to offer are buried two taps away, while sharing on Google's own fledging social network is, naturally, the first option.

Part of the appeal of Flipboard is that it hooks into Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr and a variety of other social networks and pulls content from them to build out a sort of socially-curated magazine. That's not what Google is going for with this app. Instead, it works more like a glorified RSS reader with popular media brands hanging in the front window.

At first glance, there doesn't appear to be an easy way to comment on articles. That's not typically built all the way into this kind of app, but at least on Flipboard you can easily tap through to the original article on the Web if you want to chime in with a comment.

Awesome Tools For Publishers

What Google's app lacks in terms of user experience and social integration it may well make up for with its self-serve tools for publishers. Google Currents Producer lets bloggers and news site publishers build out and customize their presence on the app. This includes adding custom RSS feeds and content sections, ingesting YouTube videos and customizing the look and feel of the publication.

The customization options include adding branding and other images, pulling in social network updates and even fine-tuning the design of article pages with custom CSS. From the same browser-based management console, one can also preview how their Currents module will look on a variety of devices. If a basic, on-screen preview isn't enough, they also offer one-time use QR codes that allow the module to be tested within the actual app running on a supported device.

Another advantage of this being a Google product is that it integrates directly with Google Analytics, which allows publishers to collect page view data, something Flipboard and its competitors don't currently support.

These tools are really powerful and they're the kind of thing that many publishers would pay for, especially if they were available as a white-label way to build out their own stand-alone native or Web apps for tablets and smartphones.

Overall, Google Currents is a start. When compared to existing products, it doesn't quite shine. For Android users who are still waiting to see what all the Flipboard-related buzz is about, this is definitely a viable alternative. That said, Google could stand to learn more from its newfound competitors, who for their part, could steal a page or two from Google's own playbook when it comes to catering to publishers' needs.

In return, WordPress is offering independent publishers a chance to make money on the WordPress platform. WordPress already provides a healthy living for thousands of self-employed developers, and now publishers have a chance to earn money from their WordPress content, too.

Monetizing The Long Tail

Federated Media is known for representing high-traffic sites. We at ReadWriteWeb work with FM, for example. But Federated Media recently acquired Lijit Networks, which will help it improve its targeting of ads to long-tail content.

WordPress.com blogs, in total, receive almost 300 million monthly unique visitors, so the partnership between FM and Automattic, parent company of WordPress, is a great opportunity for its advertisers.

You Deserve Better Than AdSense

"We've resisted advertising so far because most of it we had seen wasn't terribly tasteful," says the WordPress announcement. "It seemed like Google's AdSense was the state-of-the-art, which was sad. You pour a lot of time and effort into your blog and you deserve better than AdSense." WordPress wants to serve ads that reflect the individual nature of its bloggers, and the WordAds program, targeted with Lijit's technology, can enable that.

WordPress Is A Job Creator

According to founder Matt Mullenweg in his 2011 State of the Word Address, there are thousands of self-employed developers making a living on the WordPress platform. His voluntary survey recorded 6,800 developers who have built 170,000 sites between them, making a median hourly rate of $50.

WordPress is building a community for independent workers, both developers and publishers, and it's finding ways to make them money and keep them afloat. That's admirable. It may have to resort to some traffic tricks to keep up with the likes of Tumblr, but it does so in order to keep its community going.

Disclosure: Federated Media is ReadWriteWeb's advertising partner.

What content management system(s) do you use, and why?

PressBooks has spent six months working with authors and publishers to refine and test the tool. Big-time publishers like O'Reilly Media give rave reviews. This team is "dreaming up what 'book production' should mean (or, some of it anyway) in 2012 and beyond."

This is the dream. It turns out quality e-books in all the important formats, as well as a Web-based version. To see it in action, check out part 1 of Book: a Futurist's Manifesto online. It's not the first e-book self-publishing tool, but it looks ready for the future, serving big and small publishers alike.

And get this: authors and very small publishers can use PressBooks for up to three books for free. PressBooks asks bigger publishers to contact them for pricing. Learn more at PressBooks.com.

The folks behind Letter to Jane, an arts magazine for the iPad, are well aware of these challenges. They are not only using KickStarter to help raise funds to produce their next issue, but they're open sourcing the code behind it, offering backers the ability to create their own magazines in the future.

Systems like Adobe's Digital Publishing Suite (DPS) can be used to build some impressive, deeply interactive tablet publications. But the cost of such solutions can be out of reach for smaller, independent publishers. They can also impose some technical and design limitations that are not present when one is coding from scratch.

For those would-be publishers who want to get started with iPad development, Letter to Jane creator Tim Moore is giving away the XCode project files to anybody who donates to cover the production costs of his next issue.

"I decided to give away the source code to donors, targeted towards those kinds of designers who like myself, really want to do something native, but are having a hard time getting started," Moore said.

Some Coding Required

This is far from a drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG app-building tool, as Moore is quick to point out. He's literally handing over the raw code, which is marked up with comments describing which lines of code do what. That code includes basic functionality such as animations and transitions, playing back video and audio files, and social sharing of content. Those using it to build new publications are responsible for getting their own content and designs into it, as well as any additional functionality they may want. Even the most simple reworking of Moore's work will require a working knowledge of iOS development and an Apple developer account.

It's also worth noting that the finished product will not be a dynamically-updated news app or Conde Nast-style magazine that sits in Newsstand is updated with new content automatically. Each new issue is its own stand-alone application. That may be a deal-killer for some wanting to get into tablet publishing, but for anybody with a small budget and a desire to get started, this approach isn't a bad way to do, and it has the advantage of honing one's iOS development chops along the way.

The iPad finally did launch, followed by its slimmer, fast successor and magazines and newspapers began developing native apps for the device. More recently, iOS 5 came along and brought with it Newsstand, a feature that gives publications special treatment and a storefront from which they can sell subscriptions (if they can stomach Apple's revenue share scheme).

The iPad hasn't managed to revolutionize the publishing industry in its first 21 months of existence, but recent evidence suggests that features like Newsstand can help bridge the gap between print and pixels.

In the two weeks since Newsstand launched, magazine publisher Conde Nast is reporting that they've seen a 268 percent increase in paid digital subscriptions. Not bad.

This progress comes in spite of a recent survey from Pew's Project For Excellence in Journalism, which showed that consumers are still wary of paying for digital content, even on tablets. It's also a positive reversal for Conde Nast in particular, who was reported to begin scaling back its tablet publishing operations in April, after an aggressive early start.

Not everybody is sold on the effectiveness of Newsstand. Monday Note's Frédéric Filloux thinks the comparisons to the iPod and iTunes are flawed and notes that while magazines have done well, daily newspapers have yet to pick up steam in Newsstand. Granted, it's still very early in the game for Newsstand, and even for tablets generally.

Native Apps or HTML5?

For at least one publication, the approach offered by iOS and Newsstand isn't going to cut it. The Financial Times let Apple pull their iOS apps after the paper refused to comply with the tech giant's new subscription rules. Instead, they launched a browser-based Web app built in HTML5, which has seen a bigger readership than their old native apps for iOS.

The Financial Times Web looks and feels fairly similar to a native app for tablets and smartphones, and even supports swiping gestures as a way to navigate through content.

Enter the Kindle Fire

Of course, when we talk about the iPad saving (or not saving) traditional publishers, what we really mean is tablets generally. It just happens that the iPad is overwhelmingly dominant in this space, for now anyway.

In two weeks, Amazon will start shipping the Kindle Fire, the first touchscreen media tablet offered by the online retail giant. While it's not necessarily a direct competitor to the iPad, the 7-inch tablet is coming to market with a price tag that's half the size of the iPad. If nothing else, it may help drive the price of the iPad and other competitors down and help get tablets into the hands of more consumers.

The Kindle Fire may not do everything the iPad does, but it does compete in at least one area: content consumption. Amazon's tablet was conceived and designed with the goal of selling more content to consumers. For Amazon, that primarily means books, videos and apps, but that's not to say there won't be new opportunities for magazine and newspaper publishers as well.

"Everything we're doing is about increasing engagement on publisher content," says Livefyre CEO Jordan Kretchmer. By drawing in conversations from where they're happening on the social Web, Livefyre sites will become the hubs of conversation about their own content again. People who prefer to chat on social networks can still be involved, but sites will still benefit from those conversations on their own pages. Twitter and Facebook are built in at launch, and Google Plus is coming soon.

The most important SocialSync feature for publishers is the automatic capturing of related comments on outside networks. When anyone shares or talks about an article on Facebook or Twitter, the comment thread on the article itself will automatically grab that comment and pull it in.

Twitter conversations are particularly hard to capture. Not only do they fly by in real time, they're scattered and incomplete. Many sites, ourselves included, love to use Storify to curate tweets manually, but the torrent of tweets can be too much to manage sometimes. Livefyre's new features can reduce that burden by grabbing related tweets automatically.

Facebook and Google Plus - which Kretchmer says is coming to Livefyre soon - are great for threaded conversations, but for that very reason, important conversations happen on those networks totally outside the confines of the original site. Those conversations represent huge value for publishers, and SocialSync will help sites that use Livefyre recapture it.

Kretchmer says the Livefyre database tracks the different sources of the comments underneath. To simplify the interface, Livefyre displays only one total number of comments. For comment threads themselves, publishers have a choice: they can separate out Twitter and Facebook comments from the on-page blog comments, or they can have one unified stream with just a small indicator of a comment's source.

The overall design of the commenting system can be styled to the publisher site. Kretchmer also says the system works "perfectly" on mobile sites. Real-time comment streaming, sign-in and sign-up through Livefyre or other social networks, and all its other desktop features work fine on mobile as well.

SocialSync is good for content strategy, because it will make the article page a more definitive location for users and search engines alike. But it's also good for community. It will take away that lonely feeling of coming to a blog post and seeing 0 comments. Kretchmer says that Livefyre helps publishers vastly increase the volume of comments and shares, creating valuable engagement between readers and staff, as well as driving traffic and increasing relevance to search.

Comments Are Part of the Story

Social networks have tried to provide this service themselves. Facebook offers a third-party commenting system, but it's not gaining much traction, and Twitter offers a range of resources to add value to publisher sites. But commenting services like Disqus - which we use here at RWW - and Livefyre let sites and their users use whatever channels they want for their conversations. Livefyre 2.0 and SocialSync will be great for publishers who want conversations to flourish without getting away from the stories that start them.

What makes a good comment thread? Start one here, and let's discuss!

The books, 70% of which are in English and nearly 30% in German, will total 65,000 titles when the project is finished.

The "Springer Book Archive" of historical books will be available on the company's Springerlink site, where its contemporary digital offerings currently reside, and will bring the total number of e-titles up to 100,000.

According to Springer CEO Derk Haank:

"Up to now, our past titles have been hidden away in our in-house library, but thanks to innovative technologies they can be made available again. We have made significant investments in this project and are convinced that the scientific community will find it useful."

The time frame is due, in part, the company says, to the fact that "Springer proactively contacts authors and copyright holders to clarify the issue of royalties for these digital editions."

Every substantial historical library that makes it online increases the ability of people around the world to gain access to the knowledge it contains. Springer is not a library, and it will cost, but at least these books will be readable whether you are in Berlin or in Pt. Barrow.

It is an interesting play by CNN. Zite is a powerful news reading iPad app with a lot of excellent functionality. It operates almost like a "Pandora for news" that gives users serendipitous resources based on inputted interest and usage. Yet, outside of being a cool iPad app, Zite is driven by some interesting technology that could be of great use to CNN.

Zite takes many things into account when surfacing news. It integrates Facebook and Twitter along with inputs that readers are presented within articles. Yet, Zite is not just a feed reader or social aggregator the way Flipboard is. Zite's backend is built off of Worio, a social search "discovery engine" designed for serendipitous content discovery. As such, it crawls content as much as it uses direct feeds from users' social accounts.

Worio, as its own stand-alone product, did not take off. Yet, Zite pivoted from the search engine to Zite with now-CEO Mark Johnson as an advisor. Johnson will stay on as CEO and run day-to-day operations from the company's office in San Francisco while founder Ali Davar will remain the executive director and Mike Klass the CTO in charge of research and development. Anderson will report to KC Estenson, general manager of CNN Digital.

"When I became CEO of Zite, I was faced with a difficult choice: take venture capital and race to build Zite into a viable business or join forces with a large company and work with a larger pool of resources," Johnson wrote on Zite's blog today. "Despite many attractive paths in both directions, Zite chose to be acquired by CNN. We found a partner who shares our vision and our passion for building an incredible discovery platform."

To Remain Content Agnostic

Johnson also said that Zite will in no way promote CNN, Turner or Time Warner (which owns CNN) content. The platform will remain content agnostic.

"We see a trend developing here, one that is about the future of content discovery, and we believe that increasingly people will come to learn about new types of content based as much upon their personal interests and passions as they do the news of the day," Estenson said in a open letter regarding the acquisition.

In the history of news media, CNN seems to be the perfect candidate to take over a digital startup like Zite. CNN disrupted traditional TV news by launching the first ever 24-hour new network and CNN.com has been at the leading edge of technology and website design for the last several years. CNN now has a wing in its digital division solely dedicated to mobile apps, starting with the iPad and likely coming to other mobile platforms.

Zite had a little controversy upon its launch in March. It was sent cease-and-desist letters from a plethora of media companies that because of the way it stripped ads out of aggregated content. It rectified the situation shortly thereafter and Johnson was brought on board to be the CEO, replacing Davar.

Co-founder Paul Canetti spent 3 years at Apple before leaving to launch a series of iOS training and development businesses. Then he started MagAppZine last July. It's a simple looking publishing platform that democratizes access to publishing online (we don't call this site ReadWriteWeb for nothing, folks, we love this kind of stuff) - a little like blogging but for an App Store world.

The company says that next month it will roll out a new pricing schedule starting at $99 per month; the service initially launched this Spring with annual pricing three times that. The price drop for version 2.0 could be much closer to the sweet spot.

"Our most basic app package launched in April of this year," Canetti told O'Reilly, "but in September we are re-launching MagAppZine 2.0, which will include the new links and multimedia, an InDesign tool, and integration with Apple's upcoming Newsstand feature. We're also rolling out a new tiered monthly pricing structure that has plans starting at $99 a month."

What does it mean to have your work available in an app store? It means there is a central place that consumers can search for it, download it, read reviews and discover related content. When it comes to software, that's not something that Google for example is really set up to do with web content.

Can PDF-type content do well in an app store context? I'm not sure, but if I had print-style content to distribute I think I would give this service a shot. It looks much nicer, frankly, than magazine reading app platforms like Zinio or HP's Magcloud (which I love in theory but never use in practice). I want to go directly to the magazines I want to read, not wander around some app store from the app store that's 75% filled with magazines of questionable quality.

Is that contrary to the ethos of democratized publishing online? It may be; the whole Apple iTunes App Store experience may be. Perhaps though the path to the future is a hybrid model though. With MagAppZine, anyone can publish a PDF magazine as a standalone app in the app store - then each publisher is responsible for driving interest to their content and presenting themselves well in iTunes. The integration of the web browser into the PDF viewer is interesting as well.

Today a startup called Visually drew back the curtains a little bit further on its data visualization technology and community. The company unveiled an index of 2,000 data visualizations, a cute Twitter visualization creation tool and promises to help anyone create their own visualizations with a series of self-service tools to be released throughout the year. Interest in the service is so heated that the Visually website melted early this morning.

That's consistent with where the founders of the company came from: Mint.com. That wildly successful personal finance service gathered consumer finance data and then drew big picture conclusions about the state of the economy and consumer behavior. The resulting data visualizations were beautiful and a key part of driving consumer interest in the company's services. That consumer interest helped the company get acquired by finance giant Intuit in 2009.

Visually's co-founders are both from Mint; CEO Stew Langille was a marketing exec there, and Lee Sherman was the company blog's editor. (Disclosure: I actually recruited Sherman for that position as a part of the small consulting practice I do on the side, though before I was here at ReadWriteWeb.)

Mint reportedly didn't create its own infographics in-house; it gathered the data sets, then hired independent designers to visualize them. Then those infographics blew up on sites like then-hot social news site Digg and now-hot Reddit.

That strategy was parlayed into a great reputation for data visualization on the part of Langille and Sherman. Now they are working on a tool that will allow anyone to create such creative work for themselves. Visually also promises a search engine that will index "all existing Web-based data visualizations" (how they will be ranked and sorted, we don't know) and data warehouse that will help seed the visualizations of their customers.

The company has told press that it will charge power users $100 to $300 per month to use its tool and has said that it could "easily" be billing $300,000 per month just from client work it has secured, without launching any public tool at all.

If that's the case, it's not clear to me why the company is going to mess around with a long tail of customers at a low price point. Are there tens of thousands of organizations that are in a position to create valuable infographics, even with the help of the easy and effective tool that Visually is promising? I'm not sure. I'm also not sure that a demonstration app at launch that makes cute Twitter avatars based on the contents of your tweets are the most effective content marketing for a B2B service, but maybe it doesn't matter: the lust for infographic power is very, very strong.

As a result of that, there is no longer a shortage of other services online that promise to make it easy to create data visualizations. How Visually will stack up with ManyEyes or Tableau, much less visualization specialists for hire like JESS3 (apparently a Visually launch partner) or Bloom remains of course to be seen. Visually hasn't launched much so far, though 2,000 examples of infographic inspiration are certainly valuable.

It's widely believed that a tidal wave of value-laden data is just about to crash over the top of the Web and the world, though. As it does, huge pockets of opportunity should appear for new service providers to offer new forms of value. Data visualization is going to be a big area of opportunity for services like Visually and for their customers.

With so many digital distractions, it's a wonder we can get anything done. For those of us for whom being productive means stringing words together, whether we're bloggers, marketing copy writers or aspiring novelists, the Internet can be a mixed blessing. Fortunately, there are a number of writing applications that attempt to block out the distractions so we can finally focus.

iA Writer

iA Writer is a popular writing application with a design that's about as minimalist as they come. The interface contains very few options and preferences to tinker with. You can put it into full screen mode or FocusMode, which highlights only the sentence you're writing and greys out everything. Other than that, the only option is to write.

It's only available for Mac OS and iPad, and while it isn't cheap, it comes highly recommended by the likes of Tim O'Reilly and Web designer extraordinaire Jason Santa Maria.

It comes with solid support for Markdown syntax so you can format your test without fussing around with the mouse.

OmmWriter

The experience of using OmmWriter isn't just about the distractions it blocks out, but also what it adds. Minimalist background images and subtle, ambient music aim to promote a state of mental relaxation and focus.

As the desktop client recommends when you start it up, OmmWriter is best experienced with headphones. You can choose from three ambient audio tracks or turn the sound off if you're not in the mood to go all-out Zen.

After a few years of offering a desktop client, OmmWriter more recently put out an iPad version, as have a few other providers. This seems especially appropriate, as the iPad (and tablets more generally) tend to be much more conducive to focusing than desktop computers with their browser tabs, desktop notifications

Clean Writer

CleanWriter, as you may be able to guess from its name, is another writing app with a very minimal design. Like iA Writer and OmmWriter, it's available for both Mac OS and the iPad, but with a smaller price tag.

Some of its noted perks include the option to write on a black background and the ability to sync files with Dropbox.

Ulysses

Rather than a blank page with few to no buttons, Uylsses offers something closer to a full-fledged word processing app for Mac owners with some project management features built in.

It may have more buttons and features than many of these other writing apps, but Uylsses is still relatively stripped-down and maintains a focus on distraction-free, semantic text editing. It's geared more toward professionals, as the price tag would suggest.

Ulysses supports exporting documents in a variety of standard formats, including DOC, RTF and PDF.

QuietWrite

For those who would prefer a free, platform agnostic approach to focused writing, QuietWrite is a Web app that lets you get started right this minute, from your Web browser. It has a few buttons and controls across the top, but they only appear when the mouse or trackpad is in use. If you're only typing, the buttons disappear. Nice touch.

As a free product, it's pretty light on features, but for users who just need to get some simple writing done without bells and whistles, it more than does the trick. Once you start writing, QuietWrite will begin periodically auto-saving your drafts. When you're done, you have the option to export the draft directly to Wordpress.

You don't need to sign up for an account to get started, but if you want to manage and publish your drafts, you'll have to take a few seconds and set up an account, which, as we may have mentioned, is free.

Byword

Platform: Mac
Cost: $9.99
Try It: http://bywordapp.com

ByWord is a writing app that's reminiscent of iA Writer, but is available for a few bucks less and is only available on Mac OS. It supports standard text editing features and Markdown syntax, as well as the more its more complex superset called MultiMarkdown.

A Few Other Options

These are far from the only distraction-free writing apps available, but this represents some of the best. Some other options worth checking out would be WriteMonkey (free, for Windows), Q10 (free, for Windows) and PenZen (a free Web app).

See also: Is More Zen, Less Plus The Way to Go?

Pencil photo courtesy of Flickr user orangeacid