The Scenius set, set in motion by Teri Lussier, has been playing with a clever little web app called zinepal.com.
It’s a further elaboration on the kind of feed games we’ve been playing for months, but zinepal takes us into the world of atoms.
What does it do? Working from RSS feeds you feed to it, zinepal makes a newsletterish kind of magazine, saving your selected content as a PDF file and also as Kindle tinder.
What can you do with it? Teri saw zinepal as a physical magazine, and Brian Brady wanted to take it to every barber shop in town.
Brad Coy saw it as a way of promoting $800,000 starter-condos to impoverished San Franciscans.
I don’t care a lot about paper documents, but a PDF file is much better than formatted HTML for communicating print-like ideas in email. And if the person on the other end wants to print — or forward — your content — shazam!
Other folks had other ideas, and they can speak for themselves.
But what can you come up with? Take yourself to zinepal.com and see what you can put together.
I traded email with the developer today. He’s eager to improve the product, and there ain’t nobody with publishing needs like Realtors and lenders.
In support of zinepal, I implemented feeds in Scenius scenes today. That way, you could use a scene to aggregate content from multiple sources, then pass that one feed along to zinepal.
This is a cool tool. It could use more graphic control, and you can paint yourself into some unsightly corners. But for a quick and dirty tool for turning blog-based content into (real or virtual) dead-tree content, zinepal rocks.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing, technology
James Boyer says:
Now this is a good one Greg, where do you find this stuff. I already started putting one together, this is so easy it is fun. Great
March 10, 2009 — 6:19 am
Greg Swann says:
> where do you find this stuff
Teri brought this one home.
March 10, 2009 — 7:46 am
Teri Lussier says:
>Teri brought this one home.
I take no credit.
This was generously sent to me from one of the finest and funniest people with which I’ve ever had the pleasure to correspond, Larry Yatkowsky.
Vancouver BC is one lucky city! 😉 http://www.yattermatters.com/
March 10, 2009 — 9:04 am
Jennifer K Giraldi says:
Realtors and Lenders with publishing needs?? You are right about that. Zinepal looks interesting and I will try it. PDF is the best format nowadays. It is cleaner and everyone can use it.
March 10, 2009 — 7:34 pm
Sonny Kwan says:
I want to thank Greg Swann for sharing Zinepal.com with his readers , it is a great tool to look into.
March 11, 2009 — 11:48 am
Kevin Sandridge says:
Greg – I loved the Zinepal.com idea when you first pointed me there the other day, and I’ve become more enamored with it every day since! This could be very powerful if used in the right way. I’m still wondering whether to invest in printing them out – but as email attachments or FREE downloads – I see some real potential!
March 11, 2009 — 12:36 pm
Matt McGee says:
Found ZinePal last week and love it, too. I’m not sure you emphasized enough how easy it is, Greg. I went from signup to a finished (admittedly not too pretty) PDF of a month’s worth of blog posts in FOUR minutes.
Amazing. Local bloggers should be eating this up.
March 12, 2009 — 11:29 am
Scott G says:
Thanks for sharing this. I am going to have to check this out. It seems like a great little tool for sending out newsletters for sure. Thanks again!
March 12, 2009 — 11:43 am