A Hewlett Packard service called MagCloud lets you create and print a magazine online over the internet for about 20 cents per page. Powazek, Time magazine reports, made innovative use of the service, publishing a photo magazine about the storm within 48 hours of the event. Powazek drew on the work of about 70 Flickr photographers from whom he obtained permission via email. Despite a price north of $7 with shipping, Powzek has not turned a profit, but people clearly get a kick out of his product; one Australian even put in a special bulk order to redistribute back home (MagCloud doesn't ship there).

Issues commemorating the election and inauguration of Barack Obama and the death of Michael Jackson have likewise been rare bright spots for print publications. But it remains tough to make money from one-off print runs. If only there were some sort of large, internet enabled device with a display large and high-resolution enough to get people to buy these sorts of albums over the internet.

[via Daring Fireball]

Arianna Huffington is famously aggressive about plucking bloggers from her personal life; in 48 hours last year she invited "someone at a book signing... a fifteen-year-old lecture attendee; a bookstore owner; the Asperger's-afflicted teen-age son of a radio d.j.; a woman... who was trying to stop insecticide spraying."

But the internet mogul doesn't pay the vast majority of her contributors; they must make the work pay elsewhere, and this is where HuffPo gets itself into trouble. Kim Evans, who wrote about treating swine flu with enemas, just happens to be the flacking author of a book called Cleaning Up! The Ultimate Body Cleanse. New York City's comptroller, William Thompson Jr., has used his HuffPo blog as an extension of his mayoral campaign. And so on

More alarming is the site's relationship with Russell Bishop, like Arianna Huffington a disciple of the culty Movement for Spiritual Inner Awareness and its worshipped leader John-Roger. Bishop co-founded the employee development firm Insight Seminars with John-Roger; Insight shares a "Spiritual Director," John Morton, with the religious group and at one point its headquarters was monitored by John-Roger via widespread listening devices, according to a Los Angeles Times exposé.

Arianna Huffington has forced her staff to attend Insight retreats, according to insiders.

She's also installed Bishop as HuffPo "Senior Editor at Large." Bishop's role, an insider tells us, is mainly to recruit bloggers to the Living section and shape its tone; it's this same Living section that contains the pseudo-medical articles Salon's doctor, and a great many science bloggers, complain about. This, perhaps, explains why the section has so many MSIA true believers.

Indeed, Huffington's relationship with MSIA — she is an ordained "Minister of Light" in the group and loads her iPod with guided MSIA meditations — might also give a clue as to why her website has such a heavy focus on alternative treatments.

According to Life 102, a memoir by disaffected ex MSIA member Peter McWilliams, John-Roger discouraged traditional medical treatments, often "healing" people with his own spiritual powers. After McWilliams got sick in Africa, apparently from parasites, the guru advised him to go to a self-described "nutritionist" rather than a real doctor. When he did visit a real doctor, John-Roger admonished him:

When I told J-R about my rapid healing thanks to Western medicine... he told me it was just "a coincidence" that I started getting better within twenty-four hours of taking the prescription. "The natural way was working, and you would have gotten better at exactly the same time because what cured you was the natural medication. The prescription drug just polluted your system, now I've got to work on taking all the toxicity of it out of your system."

Now, thanks to the Huffington Post, we can all question Western medicine in this manner.

(Pic: Huffington and John-Roger at a 2004 book party.)

Zivity made several big mistakes:

• No hardcore: Zivity clung to artistic pretensions, screening pictures for "tastefulness," "respect," and "promoting female beauty." Which is morally commendable, but proved disastrous from a business perspective; free tasteful nude pictures are chock a block on the internet; as even Arianna Huffington knows, people only pay for the fetish stuff.
  
• Suicide Girls: As Fleshbot noted when Zivity launched (NSFW link), amateur-y SuicideGirls.com already had a large online adult community when Zivity entered the fray. Suicide Girls also had a large user base of people interested in amateur, or at least amateur-looking, porn.
  
• It cost money: Really good amateur content has proven it can attract readers; really good professional content can make people pay. Zivity tried to combine amateur content with a $10/month subscription model — before it even had any breakout hits.

One thing you can't blame for Zivity's crumble: Brain-dead, sexually repressed male patriarchy. The site was started by Cyan Banister, a seasoned tech exec and sysadmin — and one of her site's first models (see picture at top). And its early investors included none another than Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley's most prominent gay venture capitalist.

Thiel has said there are "only a handful" of companies "truly innovating" in tech today; perhaps he can show Zivity how to unlock its inhibitions and push the envelope while there's still a little time left for the vastly reduced site.

(Top pic via Fleshbot, NSFW link)

Ad Age's Simon Dumenco is shuddering:

Really, the school — which exists to train journalists — should know better than to honor a woman who thinks journalists should work for free!

...Now please excuse me as I crawl under my desk and curl into the fetal position.

It's true that there's something awkward about Huffington's award; we said so last month.

But if it's Huffington's volunteer model that makes you feel queasy, it's time to get over the feeling, because the internet mogul is hardly alone in exploiting unpaid contributors. Just this morning, the New York Times' David Carr wrote about a group of laid-off New Jersey journalists whose independent website, it turns out, earns enough to pay them all of $42 per week.

And the Times itself is experimenting with citizen journalism, on its Brooklyn blog "The Local." In fact, newspapers across the country have been tinkering with unpaid online contributors for years now.

If you're going to cower in fear of Huffington, it should be because you have to work for her. It's far too late to fret over her successful — and widely copied — business model.

But you can't say it didn't generate any user dialogue:

Citizen journalism, ladies and gentlemen. [Ad Age]

Despite the fact that the basic facts of the evening seem to be proven, Wikipedia's power-mad power-users are immediately deleting any and all mention of the John Edwards lovechild scandal the second any other user adds it. You could go over there and add "In July of 2008, Edwards was confronted at a Beverly Hills hotel by National Enquirer reporters searching for evidence of his participation in an extra-martial affair"—all true and verified by more "reliable" sources!—and it wouldn't last two minutes. (Actually you couldn't add that. The entry has been locked.) It's not notable enough for them, apparently. Though this is. And hell, so is this!

But no, the details of the probable end of the political aspirations of one of the 2000s most visible Democratic politicians are just not as notable as the fictional history of the Wookee homeworld.

(Kudos, of course, to the enterprising editor who buried mention of this scandal in this unread entry on a book by Rielle Hunter's ex-boyfriend Jay McInerney.)

• "The more people who visit the site the faster he bleeds."
• 
  
• "This website is like nothing we've ever seen before." And: "The public is tuning in at an alarming rate."
• 
  
• "OMG"
• 
  
• "At times his insults and his humor, in the language he imitated, were so subtly placed that they could be missed completely."
• 
  
• "Anything you say will only promote the site and kill him faster."
• 
  
• "You get the sense of a young woman who works very hard, whose friends think she's funny, and who's been tasked with impersonating an older, much worldlier gay man."
• 
  
• "Any American who visits the site is an accomplice to murder."

• Bonus video:

  Answers: Movie, Movie, Movie, N+1, Movie, N+1, Movie. BUT all apply to each equally! Right?

Backfence had secured at least $3 million in funding from SAS Investors and Omidyar Network, the investment vehicle of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Little explanation is provided for Backfence's closure, but little is required. Journalism is a difficult business; citizen journalism is a precarious business ... if it's a business at all.

From Dan: A Letter to the Bayosphere Community [Bayosphere]