Yesterday, I was doing some “work” in a Starbucks near my apartment.
This particular Starbucks shares a building with a Barnes and Noble bookstore. So, after I packed my laptop I decided to go browse some magazines for free.
As I was flipping through the latest Wired issue with Sarah Silverman on the cover (Issue 16.02, February 2008) I came across an interesting article/illustration titled “The Life Cycle of a Blog Post.” Read it here.
See the article’s illustration below (Larger version can be viewed at Wired):
There are a lot of cool magazines out there. In fact, there are so many that there is no way I could possible keep up or find most of them (Especially since I don’t really read magazines anymore thanks to the Internet and RSS feeds).
It got me thinking about the life cycles of most magazine articles.
Magazines are usually published on a biweekly, monthly or quarterly basis. That means that they are pushed out through their distribution channels (i.e. mailboxes, magazine shops & bookstores, airports etc) and replaced at the same interval.
That means that every two weeks, month or quarter they are scuttled for a new issue.
If you don’t have a subscription that means that you have to hunt down back issues on the Internet or go to your local doctor’s office. Both options being less than optimal.
If you think about it, that’s a very short life cycle. Unless they are piling up on a bookshelf in your bathroom, their life cycle is usually over in a couple weeks.
And, their ghosts usually stay very quiet. Magazine articles from past issues don’t show up in Google search results or get references in online newspaper articles or links from blog posts (because dead links don’t talk).
What a bummer. This makes me sad. There have been so many top notch magazine articles published never to be viewed or read by my eyes.
Note: To be fair, magazines like Wired also publish most of their articles online giving them a much longer life cycle.
