Here's one of the design pages from the new TNI website that is under development. I'm leading the project for The New Individualist. I've had the pleasure working with one of the very best web design teams out there: Gravitate Design Studio.Working on the TNI project are Cyndi Ngyuen, Clay Woodward, Jaoquin Lippincott, Michael Parker and Brian Hunt from Gravitate. (Check out the Metal Toad Media site -they merged with Gravitate last year.)
One of my tasks was to decide the functionality and interactivity we wanted on the site. I was impressed with the auto-podcasting function that the International Herald Tribune is using, and after speaking with the Sweden-based ReadSpeaker company, which produces the technology, decided to include this function.
For social bookmarking, I found the tool "AddThis" (which I first saw on the TIME magazine site) to be a better solution than choosing individual Digg, reddit, Raw Sugar, etc. icons.
We'll have the usual ability to post video, audio, and slideshows, and will have a "10 top stories" function.
I decided to go with a "Live Discussion" function modeled after that of The Washington Post.
I'm in the process of programming a Personal Brain (love their tagline: The Digital Home for Your Mind) for TNI. I've had previous discussions with the Brain principals and they offered to do some customization on the TNI brain. How great is that?
In the meantime, I'm pursuing an entrepreneurial move to work with a top software team to bring a novel and yes, radical interactive video application to market. More on that later.
Having to get a solid handle on Internet advertising (something TNI didn't do on the old, decrepit site), I was lucky enough to take a day long seminar from the amazing Leslie Laredo of Laredo Group. (Incredible seminar.) We'll be using OpenAds for the ad server -thanks to Jaoquin who told me about this. And the standard size ads will need to be worked into the site. (See how much fun it is when you work for a small, independent mag -you get a closet full of hats.)
Meanwhile, Kira Newman, of McGill University, was just down here helping us film our first videos for the web. Last night, editor-in-chief Robert Bidinotto, and I had dinner with Kira and her dad, Ray. It's been a wonderful couple days. We're delighted that Kira will be interning with us over the summer as well. She's a very intelligent student with an impressive resume.
Update: I failed to mention that our Internet ad system will allow us to do geotargeting (reaching a particular region of the world only with your ad), dayparting (prime-time, etc.) and more.
