Google Retires Knol

As I anticipated the lackluster Google project started on December 13, 2007 is slotted for the trash heap as of next month. This is from Google late this afternoon:

As part of Google’s prioritization of product efforts, we will be retiring Knol. From now through April 30th, 2012, Knol will work as usual, but we’ve made it easy for you to download your knols to file and/or export them to Wordpress.com. From May 1, 2012 through October 1, 2012, knols will no longer be viewable, but can be downloaded and exported. After that time, knol content will no longer be accessible. We hope that this timeline provides you ample time to transition your content. For more information, please visit our FAQ: https://knol-redirects.appspot.com/faq.html

Amplify/Clipmarks Now Clipboard

Image via CrunchBase

If some of you are wondering what happened to your aggregate blog on Amplify well, it's gone. I'm not exactly sure when it went down but here's what I got when I tried to access mine:

Amplify is shutting down immediately. We’ve had a wonderful run and we are grateful to everyone for taking the journey with us.

We’ve arranged for all of our users to be granted Clipboard accounts, which we believe is the best place for you to continue clipping the Web. Our existing users will receive an invitation by email, but anyone else can request an invitation directly at www.clipboard.com.

Clipboard will hold Amplify’s databases in trust and if there is sufficient interest they will provide a migration tool to import Amplify clips into Clipboard.

Please visit the Clipboard Blog for more information about this news.

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The Top Ten Ways To Build A Digital Magazine

Image via Wikipedia

With the growing number of smartphones, tablets, and eReaders, why limit your audience? Create content that works for everyone, no matter what technology they prefer. Martha Rotter, co-founder of Woop.ie, reviews 10 of the best tools Let me guess. You have a huge team of highly skilled designers and developers who use your unlimited budget to publish your beautiful, well-written content regularly for every type of device. Each device is then tested it to make sure it's an intuitive and readable experience for your loyal customers. Probably not reality for most of us. The great news is that digital subscriptions are growing and people are buying devices to read more content. It's an exciting time for digital publications, and marketplaces like Apple's Newsstand are helping consumers to find more of what they like and subscribe easily. But here's the problem: device versions, hardware capabilities, operating systems, memory specifications and everything else are changing every day. So is the amount of content people read and interact with. Publishers need to be able to reach as broad an audience as they can while still maintaining a sane workflow and budget. How is this possible? New tools for website owners, content managers, and publishers are growing, too. Below you'll find reviews of 10 methods of getting your content to a wider audience. I've included pros and cons for each tool as well as sample sites so you can see their end result in action. Some require a seasoned developer while others are more plug-n-play. Whatever your scenario, there is definitely something there to meet your needs and build your audience. Everything I mention below can help to create content that works in more than one place. I specifically did not include products that create only PDF documents or only Flash applications or publish only to the iPad, for example. Read More Here

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