Want Great Original Content? Zinio is a Pain for Regular Humans, but is God’s Gift to Bloggers

I recently posted about how the Firefox plug in Update Scan can help bloggers discover great non-syndicated content that Google hasn’t picked up on yet.

Here is another approach that’s even better at putting content in your hands that not only isn’t syndicated, but also may NEVER get indexed by Google unless you put it there.

Check out this recent post I made about taxes on private jets.

It’s based on an article contained in a magazine that is one of hundreds that still don’t get the Web. You know the ones — their philosophy is “hey, we work like dogs to research and write all this stuff for our subscribers, there’s no way we’re going to put it up on the Web for free!”

Their philosophy is to deliver their content “electronically” to paying subscribers in a format that’s all DRM’ed up and hard to share. PDF of course is probably the best for the users and search engines, but there are several other goofy “magazine-ey” formats that many publishers (but not readers) like better.

Zinio is one of these unnecessary PDF alternatives that has animated page flipping and other goofy features, but makes sharing, searching, reading, and navigation a chore by comparison. In general they ignore the fact that the Web is a different medium than print, and lock everything up as tightly as they can. Often these readers feel like they’re written in Java and can bring your browser to it’s knees with bloat. I’m not alone in this line of thinking, Jeff Jarvis posted back in 2006 about how systems like Zinio are “not only awkward and unsatisfying but wrongheaded.”

You might think I don’t like Zinio and it’s ilk, but the fact is I LOVE these silly little walled gardens. One key reason is that Google can’t spider them easily, and the DRM is easily circumvented. A moderately geeky blogger can extract text at will.

If you subscribe to a magazine that’s obsessed with walling their content in, you can often post about an article and often be the first to do so. That’s the case with the post I reference above.

Note the quotes I placed into my post. Check out what happens if you search on a distinctive string within:

Google sees this as a unique string that only exists on my site!

Now, we bloggers with scruples will do what’s right. We’ll post only short quotes that are a trivial subset of the article and link back, crediting the source. In thanks for the original author’s hard work, I want to only whet the taste of readers and induce them to subscribe to the source publication.

But what about those sploggers and content-lifters who don’t play by the rules?? They’d likely regurgitate the entire magazine. Content creators, beware of walling in your content. You need to get blogging about your articles. Let us know if you need help.

BTW — We’ll demo this and other handy original content discovery tips at the upcoming Blog Business Summit.