Bandwidth, Sync and Magazines

Seth Godin has a particularly provocative post re: bandwidth of products (how much fidelity they have) and how much said products allows the creators to interact with the audience.

Here, I’ve taken Seth’s chart and edited it to make it more magazine specific.

The one bubble shows what I’d call the public perception of magazines, a relatively "high quality" product that doesn’t have much interaction (letters to the editor notwithstanding).

The lower bubble shows where magazines have been trying hard to get to, now that they realize how important their audience is. Near everything Dan Blank writes and Michael Turro’s brilliant essay illustrate the need for greater audience interaction from magazine brands.

You’ll notice that Seth has placed a PDF neither where the public perceives magazines to be nor where thought leaders think they should go, but what happens if that PDF becomes a true digital magazine? If you add audio, video or animation, you automatically increase the fidelity of the product. You get more information into the product in a wide variety of formats. In short, you raise the bar re: the quality and quantity of content.

But you don’t need to stop there. By promoting digital magazines through Facebook and Twitter, you’re also moving the product over to where magazines need to go. By embedding Twitter feeds inside the publication, you’re doing it even more. These are all incredibly easy things to do inside your Nxtbook.

In the end, a Nxtbook’s greatest strength is its flexibility, the ability for it go both where your audience wants it to and where you think it should.