Well, I may be leaving Penton just in time. On-demand printing has hit the publishing business. Hello, MagCloud.

Or then again, maybe not. A single issue of Windows IT Pro, published via MagCloud, would cost a subscriber $18.20! (84 pages, including front/back cover, at 20¢ per page and $1.40 shipping) And that’s with no markup/profit for the publisher.

Still, it’s a full color magazine, printed on an HP Indigo, so it is probably quite high quality. Full color, and I’m guessing that it’s printed on better paper than the toilet paper most magazines are printed on these days. (We can’t all be National Geographic)

Could be just the ticket for a quarterly journal or other high value publication. But for the low-budget ‘zine-type publisher, you’re still better off investing in a copy machine and a saddle stapler.

This morning, I posted an article that was highly critical of Matthew Drayton’s management of the Interarchy file transfer application since he, as Nolobe, purchased it from the original developer. Specifically, I was frustrated with the lack of communication and shutting of communication channels between the big 9.0 release and the much-needed 9.01 bug fix which just came out.

Only a few hours after I posted this article, Matthew contacted me to apologize for the release and also to explain the circumstances which made a timely release of 9.01 impossible. As my criticism was both public and unjustified, I’ll apologize here, publicly, for this criticism. I have also unpublished that article.

However, beyond the specific criticism, it does demonstrate the importance of maintaining open communication with your customers. While most customers respond favorably to open communication, I think it’s especially important for small and independent companies, including independent software developers. This is probably even more important for independent developers who sell exclusively online, since their customers are much more likely to be part of the blogging/forum posting/twittering crowd.

People who purchase from independent developers act like grass roots supporters of a political campaign. Whether or not it’s justified, they feel that they are on a first-name basis with their favorite software’s developer, and they tend to especially watch new products from the same company.

This relationship is based on trust and communication. Those developers who actively maintain blogs, participate in forums, or who simply email quickly and responsively to requests can generate very passionate users. (Even if their software isn’t terribly high quality!)

Of course, those supporting customers come to count on this open communication. If it breaks down, it can leave customers feeling abandoned, and make them lose faith in the developer and their software. It can cause them to cease upgrading or even to defect to other programs. And, of course, there’s the beatings that an unresponsive developer can face on forums such as VersionTracker and MacUpdate.

What some developers overlook (and, again, I am not picking on Matthew here) is that this intimacy is a two way street. Just as the open communication helps users learn to use their software better, it is also a fantastic tool for priming the market for new updates and new products. And, perhaps even more importantly, it creates opportunities for the developer to get their users’ aid when they need it. Whether that’s a request for patience on an overdue update, advice on where to move web hosting to, or to gather a group of volunteer beta testers or even contributors. (documentation wiki, anyone?)

When Nolobe went “dark,” and stopped posting to blogs and pulled its forums, I lost confidence in the company and the software. I hadn’t upgraded to Interarchy 9 and was still using 8 until a less buggy version was available. Even though the developer was doing his utmost to get that 9.01 update out the door, it took a few months.

In the grand scheme of things, that isn’t much.

On the other hand, I’ve been using Interarchy (well, Anarchie and then Interarchy) for more than ten years. Seeing it change owners and then become unreliable on the next update is something else entirely.

Should Matthew have posted, at a minimum, a blog entry saying “It’ll come out later, please be patient?” It couldn’t have hurt. When a favorite restaurant is closed, you at least expect a sign saying when they’ll be open again — whether that’s tomorrow morning and you just caught them outside of business hours, or if it’s in a few weeks while they renovate.

Sometimes a person doesn’t even have the time or energy to even do that much. But for the users, the faithful supporters of a business, that note can mean everything.

Want proof? I just purchased the Interarchy 9 upgrade I’d been holding off on.

I didn’t buy it by way of apology for my undue critique. I bought it for two reasons: It fixed the bugs that made me hold off on the upgrade in the first place; and Matthew’s prompt and charitable email, even after my harsh criticism of Matthew himself — not just his software or his company. This email restored my faith in Matthew and Nolobe as stewards of one my mainstay programs. After all, what could be more personal and intimate than that personal email?

They say that a big part of creating a backup system is testing its ability to recover your files if there’s a failure. Well, Business 2.0 learned a valuable lesson when they lost their magazine’s latest issue and found their backup system wasn’t up to the task of recovering it. Luckily, the lawyers had a copy of every article (presumably to approve every use of the term “nappy”) and saved the day.

I’ll refrain from any lawyer jokes.

I tried 1-800-GOOG-411 for the first time today and was blown away with the results. It’s directory assistance powered by Google’s local/maps search. I got the info I wanted faster and easier than I would from T-Mobile, and the cost was nearly infinitely lower.

In this world of ubiquitous search, I’m amazed that T-Mobile, Qwest and their ilk can still get away with charging more than a quarter for this service, let alone $1.50. Way to go, Google!

Apparently Best Buy has been running a shadow copy of their website so that people looking for online prices while shopping in the brick and mortar stores will be unable to find the lower online prices.

…even when one informs a salesperson of the Internet price, customers have been shown the intranet site, which looks identical to the Internet site, but does not always show the lowest price.

From The Hartford Courant

Testing shows a “These Come From Trees” sticker on a paper towel dispenser reduces paper towel consumption by ~15%

Pretty impressive for a sticker. And the right way to do activism. Encourage good behavior in the Big Guys (business owners) by offering to save them a few hundred bucks worth of paper towels every year. Meantime you give the potentially moral schlub a little reminder to see if you can get some better behavior.

John Gruber ran an excellent article, ‘Beta’ is Not an Excuse, dissecting the important difference between beta software and simply buggy, but released, software. His target: The much ballyhooed CD burning application, Disco. His point was simply that calling Disco “beta” is disingenuous, because as long as they’re selling the software, they have an obligation to their customers to create software that works.

Simple logic, but it misses the true genius of their approach: They’re using pre-sales as a means to gain investment capital to fund the final development of Disco!

I got the following message in my RSS feeds this morning:

Thanks for your interest in the Bastard Operator from Hell. Simon Travaglia, the author of BOFH, has asked us to remove links to his articles from our RSS feeds. We will not restore the BOFH RSS feeds without his permission.

BOFH (short for Bastard Operator From Hell) is one of many columns in The Register, an IT-related news site. I was a subscriber to a feed that only gave me the hilarious stories of the Bastard, and I enjoyed reading them.

A very, very, interesting new product from Google just launched: Google Website Optimizer

They boast that it can perform multivariate tests of landing page content in order to increase website conversions. In non-marketer speak, that means that you can send people to different versions of your website’s landing page, each with a different mix of text and graphics. You can then track whether or not you got a purchase/registration/subscription from each person who landed, and thus quantify the added benefit of each different combination of web page pieces.

Dreamhost, the company which hosts this site, recently suffered some pretty major issues. A few of the files I host here got messed up, there was some downtime, etc… No big deal for me, since this site only gets about 1,000 visits a month, but pretty bad for folks running businesses at Dreamhost.

However, Dreamhost has done a great job dealing with this. They keep a blog letting you know what’s up with every server, and they’ve released a detailed accounting of what happened and how they’re resolving these problems and making sure they won’t happen again.

Fark’s Drew Curtis doesn’t pull his punches as he takes on traditional media’s advertising model, web-based empire building, and pornography. You may not agree with him, but it’s well worth reading what he has to say. (From Ideagrove.com)

Not surprisingly, management fads rarely fix the problems they intend to. The Wall Street Journal may have figured out why. The article, entitled Why Management Trends Quickly Fade Away, suggests that fad-chasing management consultants tend to be under-qualified, leading to sub-standard results, and finally to the dissolution of the fad.

I suppose it’s obvious, but the gap between the rich and the poor grows while the middle class dissolves. The Economist has the scoop, plus some excellent commentary.

Via Digg.com

Who says all the good ideas for a start-up business have been taken?

At least one fellow clears a few hundred dollars a day by riding in other people’s cars so that they can use the commuter lanes.

This fellow will be made obsolete in many cities (including Denver, my local metropolis) that have instituted the option to pay a toll in order to drive in the commuter (or High Occupancy Vehicle) lanes.

Still, it’ll be a good business while it lasts.

Robert Young graces us with a very interesting dissection of what the trend of social networking means to today’s communicators and web entrepreneurs.

As I watch Penton shift from a one-way publishing company (we are the experts!) to a social network/community (we bring experts and users together!), this seems especially apropos.

To some extent, self-expression should be viewed as a new industry, one that will co-exist alongside other traditional media industries like movies, TV, radio, newspapers and magazines. But in this new industry, the raw materials for the “products” are the people… or as Marshall McLuhan might say, “the people are the message” when it comes to social networks. So for any player who seeks to enter this industry and become the next social networking phenom, the key is to look at self-expression and social networks as a new medium and to view the audience itself as a new generation of “cultural products”.