OpenZine is not a new service, however it is new to me. While browsing a few new adds on my Twitter account I saw that OpenZine had followed me. Always curious as to new adds I decided to check it out. OpenZine’s tagline is, “The Newsstand Made by Anyone. – Quickly create an online magazine and collaborate with friends.” That tag line explains EXACTLY what the service does. It allows you to create magazines, covers and all, in a partial blog format that they will deliver as content to anyone who comes to the site. What OpenZine attempts to be is a social publishing platform that allows you to create everything you wish to publish online and share them to fellow creators and a loyal readership base. The entire basis on how this software works is incredibly simple:
Being a network based on sharing you can find other authors who are working on similiar topics to be able include them with your own work to better put together a full ‘magazine’ online. Once you have the content you can create both the images and interface to the magazine quite easily with the built in editor as well as either import your own or images on Flickr. Once you have the content you are able to publish it in the format you want to show it as online. On the idea of sharing the information if you include others material or someone includes yours- full control and credit is left with the original author.
It’s a creative service and one I think would do well in certain circles. As a blogger I have to say it’s not something I personally would make much use of though I can see the appeal to non-bloggers to be able to create an online magazine of this nature as well as uses a lot of great ways to use social networking to promote your magazine. If this allowed you to offer these magazines as printed copies or export them to .pdf format the service might have more use than it does currently for the blogging community.
And of course a video walk through of the service:
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