Interesting idea: that a print publication could tap into hyperlocal content and attract advertisers who would otherwise not be interested in something if it was distributed globally, ie, on the web.

Read the full story in Wired.

Web Directions North features a pretty amazing lineup of speakers, covering a range of topics vital to today’s web professionals — from mobile web design and development, to improving your sites’ performance, to semantic markup, Ajax, offline applications, and much more.

See our program for the full details, but we genuinely feel you’d be hard pressed to find a more inspiring, practical lineup anywhere else.

Intelligence vs understanding by Indi Young, the author of Rosenfeld Media book, Mental Models. Solving problems requires more than brainpower and a design fix. We need to feel our customer’s pain to fully understand what they need. So throw off your thongs and get ready to walk a mile in your client’s shoes.

Keeping the hot side hot and the cold side cold by Aaron Gustafson. Applying 1980s’ fast-food logic to JavaScript and CSS separation: techniques for keeping your presentation out of your scripts.

Unreadable by Joe Clark. A species-wide experiment has been carried out on the world’s cyber citizens and the results are in. Thanks to the web, our brains are changing and our ability to read long is going the way of the typewriter. Is this really what we had in mind?

Friction by John Allsopp. Is the web really the deathknell of print? With its ability to augment, to manage risk, and reduce friction, it might just be its renaissance.

How fine is your design by Ethan Marcotte. The line between a successful design and a clever one is fine. Are you willing to make the ultimate sacrifice and hit the delete button on that work of pure genius to give the client what they want?

Veerle Pieters — My favourite typeface. Veerle Pieters on the topic of typography, and why she chose Chalet for the design of her blog.

Lynch-ing mobiles by Sebastian Strakowicz. Is watching movies on mobile phones really the bane of the film industry, or is it the next step in the evolution and revolution of personalised content?

Exit strategy by Jeffrey Veen. Why a printed magazine may work in this age of the digital.

Designer extraordinaire Jason Santa Maria argues that while the death of the word printed on paper is exaggerated, the days of its “spot atop the mountain of mainstream content distribution is in its final days”, but sees the silver lining the this could “bring about a rebirth of design innovation online”.

Meanwhile, New Yorker columnist, and author of the highly successful “Wisdom of the Crowds” James Surowiecki considers the issue in detail in this weeks “The Financial Page”.

Surowiecki concludes

For a while now, readers have had the best of both worlds: all the benefits of the old, high-profit regime—intensive reporting, experienced editors, and so on—and the low costs of the new one. But that situation can’t last. Soon enough, we’re going to start getting what we pay for, and we may find out just how little that is.

It’s clear there is a demand for quality writing, and it’s also clear that the experience of reading from the printed page is a far more pleasurable experience than reading from the screen in many circumstances, and will be for many years to come. But are people willing to pay in sufficient numbers for that? Well, at least we hope so.

to help bring more magazine archives and current magazines online, partnering with publishers to begin digitizing millions of articles from titles as diverse as New York Magazine, Popular Mechanics, and Ebony

This is wonderful news, and will go a long way toward helping the survival of important cultural productions for the future.

From the article

One could imagine the book, venerable as it is, just vanishing into the ether. It melts into all the other information species searchable through Google’s most democratic of engines: the Web pages, the blogs, the organs of printed and broadcast news, the general chatter. (Thanks for everything, Gutenberg, and now goodbye.)

But I don’t see it that way. I think, on the contrary, we’ve reached a shining moment for this ancient technology. Publishers may or may not figure out how to make money again (it was never a good way to get rich), but their product has a chance for new life: as a physical object, and as an idea, and as a set of literary forms.

and may favorite bit

Go back to an old-fashioned idea: that a book, printed in ink on durable paper, acid-free for longevity, is a thing of beauty. Make it as well as you can. People want to cherish it.

Clearly, having only just started a print magazine ourselves, we tend to agree with his thesis. Well worth reading.

For today (Monday December 1st) only, register for the conference, and we’ll give you either

• a half day workshop of your choice or
• a day’s skiing or boarding at Breckenridge (return coach and lift tickets either February 6 or 7)

All you have to do is register today (no need to pay right away either). Register for the extra workshop you want along with the conference and any other workshops you want to attend, and we’ll deduct the price of the workshop from your invoice before you pay it.

If you’ve already signed up, no need to worry — if you register for a half day workshop today, we’ll offer you another half day workshop, or a day at Breckenridge as well.

And we look forward to seeing you in Denver in February.

We’ve recently announced our latest conference, Web Directions North, to be held in Denver in the first week of February, and featuring an amazing line up of practitioners (not just talking heads) speaking about things like website performance, web design, ajax, offline web applications, mobile web design and development, and much much more, with a who’s who of speakers, like Dan Cederholm, Brad Neuberg, Rachel Hinman, Nicole Sullivan-Haas, nearly 30 in total.

One goal of our conferences is to make them accessible as possible in terms of pricing — our rule of thumb is “less than the price of a cup of coffee each working day”. Thus year, we’ve kept the pricing the same as last year, at $795 (that includes taxes, as well as catering, receptions, parties, as well as two absolutely solid days of presentations)

But, to thank all those who’ve shown their interest in Scroll, we’re taking another $50 off this, for the next two weeks, if you book with the promotional code WDN09SM.

And, we’ll even send you a copy of the first edition of Scroll as well (well, until they run out)!

The offer is good until midnight of Friday the 22nd of November.

So, if you want to hear about the latest real world developments in web design and development practice, sign up for Web Direction in the next week or so, and we’ll see you in Denver in February.