Instapaper 3.0 has a wide range of support from iPhone and iPad apps.

Since I last outlined my information workflow back in January 2010 things hadn’t changed much during the past 12 months.

But with the launch of Instapaper 3.0 I’ve finally been moved to ditch Read it Later and adopt Instapaper as my main tool for saving articles to read at a more convenient time.

Why? These reasons:

• You can now follow other users and see what other Instapaper readers are reading
• The sharing options have improved dramatically
• There’s a great deal of Instapaper support from iPhone and iPad apps
• The Instapaper iPad app is awesome

This also coincides with my recent switch from Delicious to Pinboard as my cloud bookmarking service of choice.

This was partly because of the news that Delicious might be closed down or sold, itself a result of woeful underinvestment by current owners Yahoo.

But once I discovered Pinboard as an alternative (thanks to @chrisphin) I found the slicker integration with other content sharing services and social platforms made it a no-brainer.

For example, you can set Pinboard to automatically bookmark links that you tweet, articles that you share on Google Reader, and posts you save on Read it Later and Instapaper, among others. This kind of integration between sharing and discovery services is a beautiful thing and makes organising the world’s information sooo much easier.

So two lessons learned:

• A ‘social layer’ always makes things better
• Opening up your platform and integrating with other apps and services around the web is a great strategy

I would love to hear about your information workflows online, with these services or any others, so please feel free to leave thoughts or observations in the comments.

Yesterday Amazon announced its latest quarterly financial results. One of the highlights was the news that ebooks for the Kindle are now outselling paperback books.

Since the beginning of the year Amazon has sold 115 ebooks for every 100 paperbacks sold. This is a remarkable turnaround, and one that has come a lot sooner than industry watchers expected.

Contrast this with the less than stellar performance of magazines in digital format. While iPad sales are soaring, iPad magazine sales are dropping dramatically.

So how come books are faring better on digital devices than magazines?

It’s too early to say for sure, but I have a theory that it’s all about simplicity.

Magazine interfaces on digital devices have mostly been far from intuitive. Compare magazine apps on the iPad and you’ll find a wide variety of different approaches. Each has different page and section layouts (some scroll vertically, some horizontally), broad variations in the user interface and often complex multimedia integration.

Usability specialist Jakob Nielsen concludes that iPad user experience problems are caused by an overly strong print metaphor and weird interaction styles. This will continue to be a problem until consistent interfaces emerge, as they did on the web.

While this works against magazines, it’s much less of a problem with ebooks. Books are linear, so navigation controls are much easier to learn. No instructions required, no complex user interface to grapple with.

Another reason could be the more obvious benefits of ebooks over their printed equivalents, including portability, social highlighting, instant dictionary definitions and digital notes.

The magazine experience, on the other hand, is a complex one, and porting this to a digital device is not as straightforward. As Editor at Large of Wired UK Ben Hammersley explains:

‘Print has its own grammar in striking photos, interesting design and typography, whereas for websites there’s video and flash-based content. Content for the iPad is completely different again and I don’t think many publishers have even begun to think about how to use its potential.’

Still, it’s early days for digital magazines and there are some interesting experiments that are sure to lead to better experiences.

I’m currently working with the APA and at our next digital breakfast we’ll be exploring the nature of content for the iPad with some excellent speakers, including Giles Colborne, Managing Director at CX Partners, and Mike Burgess, Head of Digital at Seven Squared, who will be talking about Virgin’s Project magazine on the iPad.

What do you think about magazines on the iPad? How could they be improved? I would love to hear your views in the comments below.

Tony Blair's autobiography, A Journey

Tomorrow I’m delivering a keynote speech to Origin Publishing and BBC Magazines Bristol. I’ll be talking about crafting content in a multi-media world, and two of my key themes will be ‘story telling’ and ‘authenticity’.

Two examples of how great communicators use these techniques struck me as I browsed an online bookstore today. Tony Blair’s autobiography  is called A Journey. Whatever you think of Blair’s politics he’s undeniably a great communicator, and the title of his book makes it clear that he’s offering a narrative view of his life, that it’s his way of making meaning from experience.

This is what anyone creating engaging content should be aiming for, whatever the channel. Human beings have always told stories, it’s how we make our own meanings from the disparate events of our lives. When we communicate we should always strive to tell authentic stories that connect with our audiences and our communities (read Seth Godin’s All Marketers are Liars for some powerful insights into these ideas).

Robbie Williams, You Know Me

My second example was the Robbie Williams book You Know Me. Robbie is on record as saying that it’s not his singing or performing talents that made him so successful, but his ability to connect with an audience.

The title of Robbie’s book brilliantly captures that sense that he’s in touch with his fans in a way that very few artists manage to achieve.

It’s a bold move to open up to your audience in this way. But Robbie pulls it off because there is a sense that he’s shared a deeper part of himself, and that’s a highly engaging quality that all media providers can learn from.

Flipboard offers a content-focused view of social media

Everyone’s talking about Flipboard, the magazine/social media hybrid for the iPad. It looks like this really could point the way forward for consumption of social media, and also be the iPad’s first real killer application.

For me the real story is that it flips (sorry) the social media thing on its head, from a view that’s focused on the people in your network into a view that prioritises the content that those people produce or link to.

That’s a big deal.

Why? Because that’s what social media is all about. Most of the time we’re interested in what the people we connect to have to say, and the content around the web that they recommend.

In other words, the use case for social media is not ‘I wonder what my friends are doing today’ but ‘I wonder what my social graph has got for me to look at’. In this scenario content comes first, not the content creator.

This might seem counter-intuitive in the  social media environment, which is driven by connections. But think about it – your Facebook and Twitter accounts are actually forms of information and entertainment (I need to credit my friend Matt Woods for that insight).

If your close friends really need to communicate with you there are better ways – phone calls and face-to-face being the most obvious. With social media we get a chance to hear what people are thinking, feeling, liking and hating. And that’s content.

The reason that social media is so effective is that some of that content is personally relevant in ways that mass media can’t be, such as your work colleague’s new baby pictures, or news of a friend’s holiday. Plus the media content that’s shared comes with personal endorsement and recommendations from people you trust, ie your network and social graph.

Flipboard takes your uniform stream of Twitter tweets and Facebook updates and applies traditional media hierarchies, prioritising stories that have high engagement and making it easier to see the important stories.

This is particularly useful in Twitter, where shortlink URLs to content  make it unclear where you’re likely to end up. Twitter has for so long been useful and innovative that we’ve got used to overlooking some of its most obvious user experience problems. Flipboard fixes many of them in one fell swoop.

There are still problems with Flipboard – the algorithms need to improve and display problems create niggles – but it’s clear that this is a game-changer.

And this is just the start. Soon we’ll look back on the way we consumed social media and wonder how we coped pre-Flipboard.

I nearly called this post Content 2.0, but decided we’re all a little bit jaded with the 2.0 label these days.

Nevertheless the concept stands: content is making a comeback.

‘But I thought it never went away’ you might say, and in many ways you’d be right. But in the past few years the spotlight has been on radical new technologies, such as social media and microblogging, and shiny new platforms, like smartphones and tablet computers. Content skulked off into the wings and bided its time.

But over the past 12 months the word is slipping out that content is back on the agenda. Smart marketers have switched on to the fact that quality, targeted content attracts visitors from search engines, gets shared on social networks and establishes authority. This approach to marketing even has its very own new buzzword: content marketing.

With this second coming of content there is a whole lot more that needs to be learned. In the past ten years the rules have changed, and an effective content strategy needs to factor in all the shiny new things mentioned above, namely optimising for search engines, social media and mobile delivery.

Not only that but the competitive landscape is harder than ever. As more and more businesses are becoming media companies, there’s more competition for the top spots in Google and more content jostling for the customer’s attention.

The growth in the quantity of content isn’t slowing down either, quite the reverse. PR companies are circumventing traditional media and publishing direct. A new wave of media companies like Demand Media and AOL’s Seed.com are applying ruthlessly efficient algorithms to create ideas for content and then streamlining the content production process using a giant pool of low-cost freelancers. Demand Media found that their algorithm-generated content produced  4.9 times more revenue than the ideas that professional editorial people came up with (guess what happened to those editorial people).

It’s clear that in the age of the second coming of content, a mixture of new and old skills is required if you want your business to thrive. Knowing your audience, and providing them with high quality content that meets their needs, is more important than ever. But creators also need to maximise the opportunities provided by search and social media, and take on board more innovations that are doubtless coming our way in the near future.

It’s a challenging but exciting time to be in the content business.

While researching good examples of sales copy for my training session on Digital Publishing Strategy for the APA this week, I’ve re-encountered the debate about long copy in digital media.

Most usability studies suggest that short copy is best for web writing, due to information overload and the scanning behaviour of users online. However, it’s clear that there are still valid reasons for considering long copy for your marketing messages, and some marketers feel that this approach is best for online marketing success.

Long copy goes back decades, where it has traditionally been used in direct marketing and print advertising. In the early days of the web it was responsible for some monstrous sales pages, centred text splattered with yellow highlights, bright red links and aggressive calls to action. Nowadays long copy pages look much better, but the techniques haven’t changed.

The advantage of long copy is that you can showcase a single product in more detail by providing in-depth information on the following:

• Product benefits
• Differentiation
• Bonuses
• Elements of the offer
• Social proof
• Guarantees

This information provides credibility, offers reasons to buy and convinces the customer to make the purhcase.

So how effective is long copy online today? Back in 2004 Marketing Experiments did a study that showed that in an online test long copy outperformed short copy in terms of conversions. I’ve not seen any dedicated studies since then, but its continued use online suggests that long copy will never die.  Marketing consultant Michel Fortin is a huge advocate, pointing out that all your pre-selling material is itself a form of long copy.

Naturally it’s all about using the right tools for the job. I agree with expert copywriter Brian Clark that testing different approaches is essential and the best advice is to go with whatever works.

In summary, I would still advise using short copy online as a general rule, but consider using long copy for the following:

• High priced products
• Luxury items
• Products with lots of features and benefits
• Unusual products
• Information products
• Unsought products (life insurance, investment products, etc)

Please let me know in the comments below about your own experience with long copy online.

Thought leaders like Steve Rubel and Erick Schonfeld perceive a major shift in web publishing. They see digital content moving from an architecture of pages towards information that is distributed in real-time streams.

According to this argument, the traditional web is based on the way we use books, magazines, journals and other static media. The hierarchy of information is structured and editorialised, whether this is done by dedicated content editors (BBC News) or the site’s users (Digg).

In contrast, the ‘stream’ presents content in a dynamic and fluid way, driven by immediacy and organised by ‘now-ness’. Examples of platforms that publish as a content stream include Twitter, Facebook, Posterous and Friendfeed.

Our way of consuming this content is different too. It’s impossible to ‘catch up’ with a stream of content, as anyone who follows more than 1oo people on Facebook or Twitter will know. Instead you dip in and out of the stream, and if you miss something, it’s gone.

Steve Rubel has made a conscious and deliberate decision to stop blogging and focus solely on lifestreaming. But unlike Steve (and like Louis Gray) I’m not about to abandon my blog.

This is because, as Steve himself admits, publishing via blog or lifestream requires a corresponding switch between reflection and immediacy. I believe that good communicators need to be capable of both.

This is one of the reasons why I work hard to balance time spent on Twitter and Facebook with more traditional long-form content, including books, essays and full-length articles. Indeed my channel for this activity is not Twitter or Friendfeed, but a blog: The Culture Club.

To summarise, I’m a big believer in content streams, but I don’t see blogs and other forms of ‘reflective’ content dying out. To be a good communicator you need to embrace both.