On Wednesday 02 August 2006 9:00 am, John Baer wrote: > Sara and Team, > > I have some thoughts about the Ubuntu Magazine project I would like to > share as a "brain dump". > > What prompted this was a rediscovered email which encouraged us to step > outside of the box, be bold, be imaginative. > > I can do that and here are my thoughts .... > > Present the material as a blog, call it a magazine or something else, but > let the technology be a blog. Let the content be dynamic and grow as > needed. Include text and multimedia! > > Manage content by classifying articles. An example of this could be > classifications like headliner, support, and news (others) and assign a > life span to each. The idea is to keep it fresh, give folks a reason to > come back, and come back often. The TOC would highlight the front page and > change as the content changed. > > An example could look as follows. > > Let's say the first story is classified a headline. It receives a headline > style (css) and is assigned a viewable life of two weeks. That is to say it > will be considered current for two weeks and then moved off the front page. > I mean front page in the context of a newpaper. Content is always viewed > most current to least. > > Let's say the second story is classified support. It receives a support > style and is assigned a viewable life of one week. > > Let's say the third story is classified news (community or local). It > receives a news style and is assigned a viewable life of 3 days. > > Going back to the headline, let's say it's an article on folks using Maya > with Ubuntu and in addition to text it includes a video clip of the work > being done. > > Going back to support, let's say it's a how-to from ubuntu_demon on adding > repositories. > > Going back to news, let's say it's an article about Ubuntu at the UN and > includes photos. > > The blog header could contain hard links to sites of interest such as > Ubuntu.com, the Fridge, FAQ's, others. The body could contain links to > sites which support the story. > > Here's the benefit of the concept. > > 1. blog technology is mature and robust. We don't have to create it. > > 2. It's different, it's dynamic, it's fresh. We do not want to be the same > as Red Hat Magazine, we want to be better. > > 3. I believe it will be easier to publish, no firm deadlines. > > 4. It provides marketing feedback. A hot topic may direct folks to a forum > thread where comments are encouraged or comments could be made in the blog. > An interactive magazine! > > As a model I suggest looking at the Songbird project site. > > http://www.songbirdnest.com/ > > Realizing there are many details to be worked out, I am excited at what > this could be. > > Cheers, > > John
I being thinking about this for the last few weeks. I think that I suggested doing something like this before,b tut he feedback was that we are not really sure how to do it. I think that Thea is right when she talks about the fridge beign here for that, but the more I think about it the more I think that we are looking at our project the wrong way, I think that instead of thinking of the marketing projects as SU, Magazine, Fridge we need to start thinking on how they can interact with each other and how we can make them interactive and encourage participation from nayone on the community. On my research for the magazine I have look at some interested stuff and some websites done with django, ruby on rails and how interactive they can be, Maybe for our purposes we need to rethink what is a 'magazine' I am afraid that by doing so we might delay the first publication , but I think that we need to start recruiting web designers or coders to see what we are capable of doing. I though about a magazine that divides in two parts; an html part and a pdf part. I don't think that we need to repeat content word by word. For example, we can have a blog by Pacal and John about art in ubuntu, they can write what is going on the art team or even new stuff concerning graphics on ubuntu (new software added to the repos, how to use it). We can take some of their entries that others found interested and expand on it in a more in depth article on a .pdf file. with more picture and longer explanations. I also though about visual ways to produce our magazine, I though about small video cast. I read on the kde dot about Kde at Lug Radio live and they talked about how kubuntu oriented it was and a demonstration about Katapult, I though how nice it would be to write an article about this wonderfull application maintained by kubuntu, but then I though that it would be better if we could have a video with Martin Meredith and him showing off katapult and how to use it and show off the upcoming feature. I think that this will help us with two of our target users, people looking into maybe trying Ubuntu, current Ubuntu users who might not know about it, Inform the community about upcoming features, etc. I would like to know what other think about how we can mix passive and interactive content. I am interested to see if this is something that we could do. I don't think that this has being done before, but the way I see open source software is capable of doing this. Sara
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