Haje’s Brain

Magazine Publishing is the act of putting a magazine into circulation in some way or another.

There are many different types of magazines, such as magazines published by manufacturers of goods (such as “Liv”, published by Volvo about Volvo products, promoting automotive safety and general Swedishness) or services (such as Reach, published by an UK train company). There are trade publications, which aim to inform businesses and traders (such as MotorTrader, which is distributed to car sales outlets and manufacturers in the UK). There are B2B publications, such as information newsletters or magazines published by Microsoft, distributed to their customers to keep them up to date. There are business-produced publication such as PC WORLD Magazine, for customers of the PC World chain of outlet stores. There are official independent magazines, such as official Playstation 2 magazine, which is produced under licence from Sony, but otherwise independent. And there are completely independent magazines, such as most of the ones you’ll see in a magazine shop.

Needless to say, a single write-up cannot cover all the different forms of magazines, nor all the specifics about one type of magazines, and all ways of funding them. This write-up will take a closer look at how a magazine comes into existence, how it is run, and how it all works behind the scenes. A lot of it is applicable also for newspapers and for different forms of magazines, but by and large, this write-up covers the inception, production and distribution of a large (100,000 copies plus), monthly magazine. (more…)

I found a wicked little animation on YouTube:

But it isn’t annotated. So I decided to see if I knew what all the parts were… (more…)

Jesus, we’ve come a long way since the 1960s. Surely, they can make a taxi that doesn’t look completely ridiculous? With the launch of TX4, I guess the answer is ‘no’.

For some reason, we get tons of press releases about how great black cabs are, and how hard all other hackney carriages suck. Of course, it’s a bit tiresome, but we could live with that, if it hadn’t been for the fact that the LTI taxis themselves are complete dinousaurs, with ancient engines and ridiculous performance. (more…)

Radio is a peculiar form of communicating, in that it is one of the very few mass communication media that is perceived strictly as a one-to-one medium. It is important to keep this in mind, both with how you write the copy that is going on air, and the type of language you use: Unlike any other media, you can actually speak directly to a radio listener without it feeling un-natural.

Of course, only a minor proportion of the world’s population ever gets on the radio. Podcasting, however, is a different matter altogether: Podcasting.net, one of the largest podcasting directories in the world, is the harbour of roughly 35,000 podcasts, showing that this genre of radio is taking off on a serious way. Seeing as how podcasting is merely a smaller-scale, on-demand version of radio, all the tips in this write-up are applicable. (more…)

LinkedIn is a social networking site, just like MySpace. The big difference is that Linked In is focusing on professional networks, and is often described as a career-network for grown-ups.

LinkedIn is located in Palo Alto, California, and is funded by Greylock and Sequoia Capital, the venture capital firms behind Google, Yahoo!, Cisco, and Apple. LinkedIn’s CEO Reid Hoffman was formerly Executive Vice President of PayPal.

The philosophy behind LinkedIn is that you are more likely to conduct business with people you trust, and that you are more likely to trust people you know, or people you are connected to via somebody. This means that if you are looking for a good writer, and you one who is a friend of a friend, you can ask to get introduced, and then initiate a business arrangement. (more…)