A few weeks ago, I posted a survey asking for input on the next magazine topic for Web Dev Publishing to pursue. The results were interesting, but unfortunately the results were not definitive, and I’m left with the same quandry as before – which topic to choose.
The winner of the survey, selected at random, was Mark McDonnell. Congrats Mark, I’ll be sending your Amazon Gift Card over today.
The top vote getters were (in no particular order)
- MySQL
- NoSQL
- JVM Languages (jruby, jython, scala, clojure, etc)
- Zend Framework
- Database technologies
The votes were pretty evenly split between all of these topics, which leaves me with no clear direction as to which, if any, of these topics would make sense to pursue (from a demand standpoint). There already was a MySQL PDF magazine, which has transitioned in to a “open source database magazine”, covering more technologies than just MySQL. NoSQL, while interesting, has been criticized as just a ‘flavor of the month’ (though the interest shown in this survey was significant). Zend Framework and JVM Languages are the two that seem the most promising.
Do you have any thoughts on this?
I’ve heard this criticism of NoSQL but find it pretty unfounded.
The entire next generation of database technologies are under the NoSQL umbrella except for Drizzle. CouchDB and Cassandra get a lot of media attention because they compete in feature set with the big players in RDBMS but they aren’t the whole story. A lot of use cases just aren’t covered in RDBMS and some of the other NoSQL players have already come to dominate this market (memcached, Redis, etc).
NoSQL as a topic is a much larger landscape than the SQL space and currently isn’t very covered.
I’m partly concerned that it’s almost *too broad* a topic, but am definitely considering this. Are you willing to write a monthly column?
how about an open source development magazine…MySQL, NoSQL, JVM Languages, Zend, etc could all fit as topics
How about a mag devoted to User Experience/Interface Design?
I guess you’d have some competition, e.g. http://www.smashingmagazine.com and A List Apart, but if you could get a bit more technical and include less fluff than those, I think it could do well.
“Less fluff?” Are you saying the world *doesn’t* need weekly “top X lists of area Y” blog entries?
I’m not *averse* to something like that, but it’s probably a bit too wide to tackle reliably at this point (but never say never!)
Hmmm I obviously like the MySQL and Zend Framework ideas, but think you’re going to find far more opportunities for topical coverage with the JVM focus. One could imagine countless ways in which such a publication could go, and particularly with Java having become such a key part of other communities thanks to the JVM options I think it would go over well.