To commemorate its ninetieth birthday next year, classical music monthly Gramophone has digitised all 1,000 editions of its legacy, comprising 110,000 pages, for its app and web subscribers.

More than just a technological feat, the resurrection and archival capabilities of digital copying and storage that have brought back value for music and video owners may also offer new long tail prospects for magazines.

The consumer value benefits are intriguing. Gramophone only launched on iPad a year ago – now 1,000 copies are available in perpetuity to subscribers for the same £3.99-a-month (£39.99-a-year) price as the mere dozen-or-so it has published digitally since launch.

Other titles have shown an interest in giving their archive a second life. Vogue magazine has made available its 119-year, 400,ooo-page history. Current New Yorker subscribers can also read all issues dating back to 1925.

But, just because modern-media storage allows it, should publishers call back decades-old content for hoped-for reward? That depends on whether their archive can be mined for what a specific audience might regard as gold today…

The Vogue and New Yorker archive plays are unapologetically geared toward historical research. Likewise, as someone recently urged by his parents to clear out his old collection of Wired magazines, documenting the important inception of digital culture, I would gladly pay to shrink their shelf’s-worth down to iPad size, kept safely in the cloud.

Condé Nast UK digital director Jamie Jouning told me in February: “Within the next five years or so, I’d imagine most of our magazines will have an archive of back copies. It’s a big process. We’d want to do it so it’s searchable, so it’s more than taking flat PDFs.”

But, to leverage an archive 20 or 50 years from now, other publishers today might want to start conceiving content in a way that is distinctly evergreen – valuable even in the future. Gramophone‘s articles are, relatively uniquely, already timeless – most classical music is, by definition, old and the magazine has always had a knack for presenting it in the present tense. Others may need to work harder and change tack.

But publishers are already behaving this way on the newsstands, which are becoming dominated by highly-paginated bookazines and magbooks on key topics, issued at less frequent intervals like half-yearly, if not as one-offs entirely. Here, instructional and commemorative content excels. An instructive example might be a monthly cooking magazine that recognizes that, today, many of its recipes will remain relevant to future generations.

If publishers can achieve similar value in the bottomless digital realm, they could end up accomplishing the notion of magazine-as-service – a massive archive of content that is not just a historical curiosity but which has everlasting relevance, and an ongoing reader payment relationship like cable TV enjoys.

The economic pay-offs are also attractive, flipping the production cost base from one in which so much hard work and cash is spent on producing content that will soon be stale to one in which costs are considered an investment in a future-proof content repository that can keep on giving.

In other words, is there a profitable seam to tap in recasting the publisher as content database?

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Many people have a collection of recipe clippings culled from magazines, newspapers, and the supermarket. But where do you put the clippings? Ideally, you type it out and put it in a recipe manager (my favorite is SousChef). If I only had the time. What I do instead is either scan the recipe directly into iPhoto from my Mac, or if I can’t easily clip the recipe, I’ll take a picture of it with my iPhone. When I see a recipe I like on the web, I take a screen shot to easily get it into iPhoto, too.

Once in the iPhoto, I rename the photo to match the actual recipe title, and then in the keywords I put the important ingredients that I’d need to know when shopping such as “chicken breast” or “celery.” This is also a handy way to search for recipes when something is on sale or in season. Then I just drop it in an album I call “Cookbook.”

I also have an album called “Current Recipes.” I, and other members of the family, will put especially interesting recipes into this album. I’ll sort them in the album to create both variety and efficiency in shopping. I have the recipes synced to a password-protected MobileMe site as well for ease of browsing. With iCloud’s Photo Stream feature, which arrives in September, this should be even easier.

You can also sync those albums to your iPhone and iPad so that you always have all your recipes close at hand, which can be useful if you stop in at the grocery store on the way home from work. Not only is this a great reference, but recipes can be easily emailed from the iPhone to whoever’s doing the shopping.

With the recipes in digital form, cooking with iOS in the kitchen is also breeze. I’ll use either my iPad or my iPhone to check out the recipe(s) I need. After cooking, I’ll return to iPhoto and modify the ratings and notes for the recipe so we know whether to make it again. If it was lousy, we delete it from the album.

Keeping my recipes in iPhoto has reduced our reliance on eating take-out, as well as being a great way for everyone to contribute to dinner. Considering every Mac comes with iPhoto, it’s also cost-effective and easy, too. Anything you think might add even more to my system?

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The Archiving Option

Brian Casel uses Basecamp for his web design business, CasJam Media. Basecamp uses a per-project pricing scheme, basing the price you pay each month on the number of active projects you have. That creates an incentive to archive old projects as soon as possible, making them inactive and therefore keeping your price for project management software from increasing. Casel notes, “Projects stay active as long as long as they’re still being worked on. As a web designer, my projects usually last one to three months and sometimes go longer.”

He hasn’t seen a need to delete archived projects: the system doesn’t remove data from archived projects, making it possible to go back and check details if necessary. “I haven’t seen a need to clean out my archived projects. My main concern is keeping my active projects up-to-date and organized,” says Casel.

The Question of Access

How you handle old projects, however, can and should be influenced by who has access to them. Depending on the software you use, you may be able to control exactly what information an individual has access to. That approach may require more work on your part, however. Casel’s system is based on what his sub-contractors need access to: “I generally use Basecamp for my own internal use and communication with sub-contractors. I rarely give Basecamp access to my clients. First, many clients aren’t familiar with how Basecamp works, so I like to keep it simple. But I also separate the two to avoid confusion. There are lots of messages between me and my sub-contractors that are more production-oriented and not intended for the client to see. When projects are completed and archived, I sometimes remove sub-contractors access and grant access only to those who are currently part of my team, which tends to change month-to-month. “

If you aren’t in a position to closely control which projects a client or contractor has access to, it may be necessary to remove past projects from your online archives. Of course, you’ll want to keep a file that you can check back on, but removing the temptation for a contractor to look back at what clients you’ve worked with and other, similarly valuable information, can be an important decision for an organization.

How do you decide when to delete or archive past projects?

Image by Flickr user Brett Kelly

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The new service, called PositivePress, is intended to overcome the transitory nature of the web by making a permanent and fully functional archive of selected sites that can then be shared. In order to make this happen, PositivePress has three main features.

1. Capture. PositivePress users can capture ongoing information streams from any web site that has an RSS feed. Each feed can be matched with keywords so that, for example, one could collect all mentions of Microsoft that appear in Yahoo News. Sites without RSS feeds can be captured manually, and Iterasi is apparently working on a system that will allow such sites to be collected on a regular basis. Iterasi has tweaked the system so that sites that rely on offsite elements (avatars, for example, or images hosted on picture hosts) won’t break when archived. The service will also resolve any shortened URLs to the original full URL, a useful feature in light of the recent threatened shutdown of URL shortening service Tr.im. PositivePress does not archive videos, however.
2. Archive. Once sites have been captured, they can be viewed and searched, using what amounts to a custom search engine.
3. Report. PositivePress includes a slick tool for sharing results from the archive by email. Users can create emails (with their own branding) that can be sent to individuals or groups. Sites can be annotated, and links in the emails go back to the archive, and also to the original URL of the site. The service includes reports laying out how often the emails are viewed and other related statistics.

The service is aimed at advertising agencies, consultants and marketers within larger organizations, and others who need to collect business intelligence over time, although Iterasi has other types of users, ranging from law enforcement agencies to universities. PositivePress is compatible with all operating systems and most browsers (although not IE 6, which is an interesting choice, given the service’s mainly corporate clientele).

Pricing for the new service is variable, depending on how many clients, feeds and pages a user wishes to track. Package costs range from $99 to $699 per month. The existing free Iterasi service isn’t going away, however. It is being rebranded as Iterasi Personal, and its 10,000-plus users will still be able to use the service to collect and share web pages.

Do you use Iterasi? Will you and your clients find the new service useful?

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Backing up your computer is an essential task that many of us neglect until something goes horribly wrong. With OS X Leopard, Apple has made it much easier to ensure that your data is always backed up and protected through a feature called Time Machine.

Time Machine is an application that automatically synchronizes your computer hard drive with another storage device every hour. Reverting to an older version of a file is simple, facilitated through an interesting ‘space-like’ interface.

This article will provide an introduction to Time Machine, explain how best to set your computer up, and the process of restoring a backup if you accidentally delete data or suffer a hard drive failure.

What You’ll Need

There are two main requirements for using Time Machine. First is a copy of OS X Leopard — older versions of the operation system don’t include the backup software. Second is an external hard drive.

I’d generally recommend buying the largest hard drive you can afford. The more capacity, the more room there is to store older files (and the further back in time you can go to restore a file). At the minimum, the drive should be bigger than the internal drive in your Mac.

Apple does offer a dedicated router/hard drive combination called Time Capsule, coming in either 500GB or 1TB varieties. If you’d like a all-in-one network router and backup drive, it’s a great option — if you plan on using it solely as a hard drive, it does work out expensively.

Setting Up Time Machine

The quickest way to get started with setting up Time Machine is simply to plug in your new hard drive. OS X will recognize that you haven’t used the drive before, and ask whether you’d like it to function as a Time Machine backup. Alternatively, head into System Preferences, select Time Machine, and choose your new hard drive from the list of options that appear.

Once set up, Time Machine will begin to back up your drive for the first time. The initial process will copy every single file from your computer’s hard drive to your backup drive. This could involve copying many thousands of files, and will likely take a couple of hours. Be patient, and choose a time when you won’t need to unplug your laptop or power down the machine.

The speed will also depend upon how the hard drive you are using is connected. If plugged in directly via USB (as most will be), the process will be relatively quick. If you’re using a Time Capsule or other networked hard drive you may need to be prepared for a slightly longer wait.

After the initial process Time Machine will only copy files that have been added or changed in the past hour, making future backups far quicker. You’ll find that the following backups are kept:

• Hourly backups for the past 24 hours
• Daily backups for the past month
• Weekly backups until your backup hard drive is full

Changing Options

There are very few options to tinker with when setting up Time Machine, but those that do exist are worth noting.

Firstly, you are able to specify a number of files or folders which you’d like Time Machine to refrain from backing up. This isn’t usually necessary, but can be handy for large files which you don’t need to keep safe.

In addition, you can tell Time Machine not to back up when your laptop is running on battery power to conserve energy, and specify whether you’d like to receive a warning when older backups are deleted.

Restoring Individual Files

Should you lose a file or accidentally delete it, open the folder which used to contain the file, and launch Time Machine. You’ll be presented with a window similar to the following:

Clicking the arrows to the right of the screen will go forward or backward in time, scanning through the various backup dates. It’s possible to take a closer look at a file through Quick Look, by selecting a file and pressing the Spacebar.

When you’ve found the file to restore, select it and press the ‘Restore’ button in the lower right corner. Time Machine will exit and copy the file back to its original location. If it would involve overwriting an existing file, it will ask you what action you’d like to take. Easy!

Restoring an Entire Backup

If the worst happens and you suffer a hard drive failure (or, on a more optimistic note, buy a new Mac!) you may need to copy everything back across from your Time Machine disk. Again, this is a fairly simple process.

If you’ve purchased a new Mac, you’ll be asked when setting it up whether you would like to ‘Migrate’ from a Time Machine backup — simply agree, and follow the instructions to proceed.

If you are booting from an installation CD (after suffering a hard drive failure), select the ‘Utilities’ option from the menu bar, then “Restore from Time Machine Backup.” You then select the Time Machine drive you wish to restore from and follow the simple instructions. Your Mac should be back up and running in no time!

Other Solutions

If you’d prefer not to use Time Machine, there are a couple of other options available:

• Use a utility to create an entire “clone” of your hard drive onto another on a regular basis, such as SuperDuper!
• Use an online service such as Dropbox or Syncplicity to backup important files and documents to your online storage space

Conclusion

Time Machine provides a simple, ‘set it and forget’ backup solution. You’ll need to spend some money to pick up an external hard drive, but I guarantee it will seem worth it when you accidentally delete a set of family photos, an important business document, or your music collection.

Restoring is simple, and it even makes the process of swapping to a new computer almost seamless. Remember to pay attention to any error messages which may pop up occasionally, and regularly try to restore a file (just to check that your backup is functioning as it should)!

Hopefully you’re now all set up and ready to sit back and relax while your Mac keep itself well protected.

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