I read WIRED in the loo. I subscribed to it when I got my first paycheck in school and have been hooked on since. All the articles are free to read online and yet I like the print. It has as many adverts as articles. Its got a whole stack of subscription slips (which I pray they’d stop for those who are subscribed) and the really annoying six page infomercial (just coz they design it like a normal article I’ll buy the stuff right away, duh). But the articles are pimped up with interesting design. The glitz makes the charts generally unreadable but the typesetting is amazing and its a fun light read.

So heres my wish, if the economics of the long tail that makes WIRED to be printed and delivered to me for less than a dollar are month are sound, why cant I get a compilation of blogs posts spat out of a recommendation engine that can guess what I’ll like printed too. I can imagine a virtual piazza for designers and bloggers where they meet and work together to create a print version of their post thats similar (if not better) to what WIRED does with its articles. And then they annotate this article and push it into a repository. People like me make their selection of articles based on author, topic, designer etc. and the recommendations that I get after the system analyzes my netvibes or google reader feeds. The publisher inserts print ads using something similar to adsense and everyone gets a piece of the action.

I know some of the posts that I read have a small half life, I would not want to read them 17 days later. But most of them can survive for couple of months and some of them are good forever. Also, since I have landed a job, the blogs that I read in a day have halved. I am sure I miss out on a lot of the action in the blogosphere now. Adsense can fail to bring up with advertiser that wants to pay for the publishing an entire article of 2 pages (print version) if its on comparison between neural nets and support vector machines. But may be Springer books is interested if they can slip in 4 quarter page book recommendations. Or may be the conferences that post on comp.ai can be approached. What would make it really cool is if a big newspaper or magazine house does something like this. I know Stallman would not approve of it if New York Times publishes one of his rants sandwiched between RHEL and rackspace adverts. But this needs a existing network of advertisers and the capital to see the idea through.

I agree that breaking even would be challenging but I dont think sony’s book reader is the answer and Kindle just sucks with its complicated DRM nonsense and the iphone was not made for this and most importantly I can fold a magazine, spill coffee over it & forget it on the subway!