idio

Idio is a new online personalized music and design magazine which went live on Friday.

Here’s how it works. Users are asked to identify themselves demographically and use sliders to express their varying interests in subjects like music genres.

Idio then selects from professionally licenced and user generated content to create a personalized Flash magazine for each user.

When reading Idio, users are asked to rate particular articles in a simple up down fashion. That data will further contribute to determining what articles are displayed for different readers.

Bloggers and other writers whose contributions are selected will be paid by revenue sharing from ads. Contributions can come through direct submission or a resyndicated RSS feed. The company says that advertisers are willing to pay a premium for microsites and rich media ads embedded in the magazine and so the revenue shared will be substantial. It will be very interesting to see who the first advertisers are - there's weren't any in the version produced for me after I signed up.

Whilst it's an interesting concept, success seems largely dependent on generating large amounts of interesting content.  Seems like a lot of work for the editors behind the scenes.  I couldn't find anywhere to sign-up as a contributor, and making it difficult for expert readers to contribute seems to be simply replicating the offline magazine model. Even with an element of personalisation, not utilising the key asset of the web - the people who use it - seems a little odd.  Will be fascinating to see how it survives in the web2.0 world.

There's posts about it here and here, via techcrunch and buzzshout.