@Jaap: I believe the concept of a magazine or any other publication has several layers of meaning which are ill served by blogs and may be valuable enough to recreate in a new form on a tactile high resolution device (though it is more probable that new and currently unimagined applications of these tablets will blow the whole digital magazine thing away).

Right now what I don’t see most blogs doing is applying rigid editorial oversight to create richly multimedial, aesthetically pleasing content that is directly monetizable and tightly integrated with the editorial workflow.

You could do any and all of these things on a blog, but it’s nowhere near common practice. Why is that? I think the externalities and the experience of creating and consuming content online in its current form make it very unattractive to do so.

It remains to be seen whether digital magazines will have a very long life on devices (like I said maybe other experiences will be more interesting or make more money) but there is a large group of people with an established practice in the publishing profession who could use this device trend as a path forward to the digital age. That alone makes it both interesting and worthwhile, I think.

I left the DHTML / Ajax / CSS camp years ago due to the inconsistant and sometimes incompatible mess that the makers of web-browser made and make of this. [HTML + CSS + JavaScript] is something that could have been totally awesome by now. This incompatibility is still there and not only because of Microsoft.

I started using Flash because I was sick of the crappy and unreliable implementation of it all (Netscape tended to introduce new fuck ups every new .0x release that sometimes even countered previous implementations) and because Flash is fairly stable on all platforms regarding workings, styling and “what you created is what is been shown to your audience”.

Each argument from both Flash and HTML side is counterable, as they approach and (attempt to) solve the same issues from two slightly different angles. Each platform can be used to build amazing online magazines and if you want to elaborate on Flash vs HTML5 I suggest we start a separate thread and make one single document with our combined knowledge to end it all.

I am positive however that the transitions are made. I know that within that same company the process is turned around and sharing content via different media has become easy. And the same editors are responsible for different media. That is a start.
Next phase will be telling a story in a new way. Like the examples shown. Luckily journalists see more and more the value of adding moving content, nice graphs etc. It will however take some time it is fully integrated in the content making, and even as important, the workflow.

The front-end technology is maybe not even the most important. The way we are gonna let editors and art directors work together, or merge into new disciplines is one. Something that is a difficult concept as the move away from crossmedia publishing by PCM shows.

Last issue are the investments that are necessary for such media neutral publishing. This will be a hurdle for smaller titles. And that is especially the movement that is going on for years now with a cheaper paper publishing process. I hope smart mashups between open technologies can help there.

I think most of the questions are already answered and will fill themselves in. What remains to be done is to make a HTML facsimile demo of the UI in Mag+ to show that it is possible. If there is a likely Javascript library that handles multi-touch and animations, this shouldn’t be too difficult.

But of course an espresso-back-of-the-napkin session is always cool!

@Peter:
Yes, the authoring competencies and the bleed over from the various disciplines is going to be a very difficult organization problem for the coming years. The merger of NRC and het Gesprek could be a precursor to these developments if they can create significant synergy.

If we set aside the technical and UX issues (yes performance-wise it is a disaster), Flash is still a nonstarter from a business perspective.

Firstly there is such a plethora of diverse Flash technologies and marketing bs both on the Adobe website and outside that it is nearly impossible to make heads of tales out of the platform fragmentation, capabilities, device support, authoring support etc. It’s a fucking mess.

Besides your claim that HTML is closed on a similar level has no merit. Flash is controlled by a single entity with a vested interest in platform lock in. HTML is an open and joint effort by implementing parties. If that is not an obvious difference, I don’t know what is.

I (as usual) do not agree with your view on neither Flash or HTML 5. To me the biggest issues regarding both are not the openness. (HTML 5 is as closed as Flash as the browser itself renders the content in a black box and thus you are dependent on the parties delivering those browsers to be able to implement stuff – and they all have their own implementation of CSS, JavaScript, DOM and specific tags like Video)
The main reason why Flash still sucks are these:
1) Slow and processor intensive rendering of visuals using your CPU instead of your GPU
2) Crappy memory management / inefficiency in resource management

HTML 5:
1) mainly suffers from a lack of “one approach serves all types of browsers”

Your view is on rendering technologies. If asked to model the problem, I’d split it in three areas,
1) Authoring environments. These should be very rich in input capabilities; able to cover a multitude of functions and devices as you design a magazine; handle rich media very well. I could see a new hybrid of a whole bunch of Adobe tools (InDesign, Flex, Premiere, …)
2) Rendering tools. These need to be lightweight, fluid, support pristine image and font rendering, and work according to some kind of standard in performance and functions (font sizing, …) that you can rely on as a publisher.
but many questions posed in these two areas boil down what’s really the core thing to solve:
3) Format. What kind of format is rich enough to convey what the concepts show but doesn’t need to get all specific? Both HTML5 and Flash seem way to specific. We may not want to hardcode swiping animations, but let the rendering tools take care of that. Same for zooming behavior, same for text re-flowing according to a rich set of guidelines (parenthesizing rules, minimum/maximum flow sizes, etc). A toolkit or library around HTML5 (i.e., HTML5 augmented with a javascript/CSS library) and/or around Flash is an avenue I would see working. The library would take a bunch of resources in a specific format (or folder structure, taking a cue from iTunes LP) and take care of things.

How about we organize a little espresso-shop back-of-the-napkin get-together to sketch it through and come up with something?