David Emery Online

Financial Times reports that talks between Apple and a number of newspaper and magazine publishers have encountered several hurdles that have slowed the deal-making process as the periodicals publishing industry attempts to understand how the move to digital distribution will affect its business.

One of the major concerns publishers are reportedly having pertains to Apple's policy of sharing only limited customer information with its content partners. As the report notes, publishers have long mined data on their subscribers in order to develop marketing efforts and evolve the focus of their publications over time, but Apple's reluctance to share that information is reportedly making publishers uneasy. […] Another concern for newspaper and magazine publishers is Apple's proposed revenue sharing arrangement, which involves Apple taking a 30% share of revenue for handling distribution.

Read: greed and cluelessness seen as hurdles to newspapers and magazines continuing to do business.

The good news is that there is web browser support for CSS gradients in Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer (Opera will most likely add it soon too). The bad news is that, for a couple of reasons, the implementation in each web browser is different from the other.

I didn’t realise there was an IE filter for doing gradients as well – handy! I imagine there’s a performance hit though…

Graphs are clearly Laurie’s raison d‘être, so it didn’t take me long to figure out that a great way of thanking him would be to write some code that does something we’ve been working towards for some time at Last.fm: generating personalized, real-time scrobbling history graphs.

I love graphs, me. Last.fm + graphs is hence a match made in heaven.

I know a lot of people use Last.fm for things like the recommended radio, forums and all that jazz but I use it solely for scrobbling and storing that data – what I played, when and how often. In fact, the more ways I could replicate the idea of scrobbling across other media the better; I’d love to scrobble watching films and TV (which technically could be done by Sky if they wanted), reading books and magazines (maybe on the iPad?) and all sorts of other things; in fact, it’s what interested me in Foursquare, which is pretty much scrobbling of location.

My scrobble graph can be found here.

But that won’t dishearten newspaper and magazine publishers. Because, for all the bluster about iPad “saving media”, their real iPad salvation is this: they can present their editions in much the same old dead-tree format they did before that pesky HTML came along.

“I believe the iPad will be about sitting in front of the TV whilst watching TV, browsing a ‘magazine’,” McCaffrey - whose 2ergo made the apps for The Guardian, Fox News, Arsenal FC and others - told me in an interview. “It will switch on in a second, you’ll be straight in to your content - it will be almost exactly like a magazine that you pick up from the coffee table.”

Yep, brilliant – that’s exactly what we need: glorified PDFs outputted by InDesign.

Bound to work out just fine that strategy. Just fine.