Why are you still writing articles for magazines?
January 31st, 2009 | Published in other | 4 Comments
I’ve written a couple of articles for some magazine’s. Not many, just a couple. But every time i’m writing an article, i wonder why i do it. It’s not that i don’t want my articles to appear in a dead-tree magazine, but I’ve noticed that many magazines don’t make their content freely available on the internet. Instead, they hide their content behind a username and password page, only accessible for their subscribers. This means that search engines can’t index the articles, and nobody can find the articles.
I don’t know about you, but i hardly read magazines anymore. Whenever i get one, i skim through it, and throw it on a large pile of magazines i should read, but haven’t got the time for. I get my information through the internet: news i get through rss feeds, which i read using google reader. And more detailed information i find using google whenever i have the need for it. I also have a large number of books that i open when i need some detailed information. So this basically means that whatever is in the magazines, I’ll never read, if i can’t find it through a search engine.
That leaves the question: why write articles that nobody will ever read? It’s like writing some useful piece, putting hours of your time into it, and then it’s locked in a safe where nobody will ever find it.
Last year, one magazine, informatie, even requested me to sign away my rights to the article, in exchange for a pdf copy of it. But i wasn’t allowed to publish it on a public website where everybody could read it. This is unacceptable, so i didn’t sign it. I can make my own pdf, thank you (here’s the pdf btw: Wat betekent business agility voor uw ontwikkelstraat?). All you can find on the Informatie site about this is here.
Another magazine, Optimize, is a bit better, but not much. You can download articles for free, after you’ve registered. But what is really bad: it doesn’t work with google. Here’s the Optimize page describing my article: Scrum: where business drives IT, but i can’t find it through google.
As long as these magazines don’t come up with a more modern way of information publishing, it doesn’t make sense to write for these magazines. Why hide your information where nobody can find it? As far as i’m concerned, if you can’t find it through google, it doesn’t exist.
