I have to admit, I'm pretty envious of kids today, because they get to play with fun stuff like Storybird. Storybird is a place for kids and parents to read and create storybooks. It's completely kid-friendly and features a gallery of great artwork that you can use to get started. Just because Storybird is targeted at children doesn't mean it's dumbed-down, though. A lot of adults I know couldn't lay out a storybook in Pagemaker, but they'd have no problem creating something nice with this.

Of course, kids can make their own Storybirds, but they can also read selections from the site's public collection. They're not all great, but the characters in the art gallery are cool enough to hold some interest (I know I would have loved the monsters, in particular, as a kid). Storybird is also looking at offering a print publishing platform, so you can use it to make real books, too. What kid wouldn't want a professionally printed version of his own book?

Dinky Page is a lightweight web page editor and hosting service, ideal for creating example pages or quickly hosting some information you need to share. If you have something to put up on the fly, and you need an HTML page, but not an entire blog, Dinky Page might be the perfect solution. You'll have to host your images and videos somewhere else, but that's not a big problem when people increasing have accounts on sites like Flickr, YouTube and Vimeo.

You only have to click one button to get started making a page on Dinky Page. From there, you can use the site's visual editor, or start writing or pasting your own HTML. Javascript and flash are supported, as is embedding. The downside of not having to register for Dinky Page is that there's no account you can log into to edit a pre-published page. Instead, you'll have to save the link Dinky Page gives you when you publish.

[via Instant Fundas]

Do you have a blog? Does it have a working RSS feed? Congratulations! You can now publish your blog on Amazon's Kindle platform, allowing users of the Kindle device (or the Kindle iPhone app) to subscribe to your blog for a small fee. You take a 30% cut, and Amazon takes the rest. It might be small potatoes, but more blogger-generated content could attract more users to the Kindle platform, which means more blog subscribers.

You don't have to do anything special to make your blog readable on the Kindle. Just put your RSS feed in over at Kindle Publishing for Blogs, and you should be good to go. As M.G. Siegler points out at TechCrunch, it would be really nice to give your blog away for free, but that doesn't seem feasible for Amazon. Right now, they decide what to charge your readers, and it's generally around $1.99/month.

The Moveable Type folks at Six Apart have officially released the cross-platform publishing package they announced late last year. It's called Motion, and it's available to Movable Type Pro users now. Motion lets you publish to multiple services at once, and it allows your community members to comment using their existing accounts on Google, Yahoo and Facebook.

You can quick-publish a microblog via Motion -- including photos, videos and other rich content -- and you can pull in your activity on other sites, including Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. This basically seems like a quick and easy way to do the kind of thing social networking geeks have been doing by hand on their own sites. If you're the sort of person who thinks of a website as a community, you definitely want to give Motion a look.

Document-sharing site Scribd and online self-publishing service Lulu have teamed up to offer Lulu's free ebooks in Scribd's iPaper format. iPaper is designed to be a versatile cross-platform means of displaying different document types online. Key draws include the ability to embed docs in any webpage, including your manuscript in Scribd's library, and adding ads to your document.

Lulu is a popular self-publishing site, handling print versions and ebook versions of manuscripts, so getting them to start rolling out iPaper is a big win for Scribd. It's not going to be available for all Lulu books at first, just the most popular free ones. If this catches on, though, the two companies will have all the publishing bases covered, from printed books to iPaper ebooks.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

If you ever had the dream of being the editor of your own magazine but lacked the experience, network and the monetary investments to get it off the ground don't give up yet. MagCloud hopes that with its services you can be the next publishing mogul.

While currently in beta, MagCloud claims that the process is easy enough.

• Create your magazine according to their specifications and upload it to their servers.
• Order a proof to verify that the magazine is how you want it.
• Set your price and publish it.

The concept is similar to that of CafePress which allows you to set the price for your own custom printed t-shirt with no investment on your part. While we haven't seen an actual physical copy of MagCloud's work, the ability to print your own magazine is tempting.

In the early days of the web, before high-fallutin' content-management systems, document control, and database-driven blogs, web authors were for the most part forced to stage their content in a clumsy, time-consuming way. Manually uploading and resizing graphics and hand-writing HTML in an early web editor like "HotDog" or "HotMetal" (remember those?) was how we all did our first web authoring, and thank goodness the times have changed.

With the evolution of multi-user content management software (like Blogsmith, for example) and simple syndication protocols like RSS and Atom, it has become much easier to run high-volume web sites that require constant content additions and alterations. Sadly, the productivity evolution also made it easier for plagiarists to steal content and rebrand it as their own--mostly, we suppose, because of RSS, which give friend and foe alike equal, unfettered access to most blogs and news web sites. Since RSS is an open system with no access controls, it's as easy to rip somebody off using their news feed as it is to use it in the manner intended--usually, syndication with proper attribution of author and publisher.

Seeing this as a problem with a business answer, a former Yahoo exec started a company called Attributor, whose service can track and monitor the use of syndicated content across the web. This is an interesting idea, and aside from setting these Redwoodians up as obvious Google Bait, syndication monitoring appears to be good business, too. Attributor just signed up Reuters as a new account. Not a bad fish to have on the hook, especially when you're just getting started. Attributor also offers a service which will enforce content licensing--allowing publishers to monetize their syndication in a way RSS alone cannot.

< I have to just come out and admit it: I've gone kookoo for Vox, Six Apart's step-ahead blogging platform and social networking service. They have done a better job than nearly any service I've seen (and believe me; we get our hands on just about everything web 2.0 here at DLS) at making it dead-easy to add audio, books, pictures and video to your posts from sites like YouTube, Flickr and Amazon.

Not content to making users sit in front of their computer all day, however, it looks as though Six Apart answered Jordan's request from back in August and released their mobile publishing client for Vox in a big way, and they even have a mobile site for staying on top of what's going on in your Neighborhood. I honestly don't know how long either of these have been around; I just noticed them while trawling their help files for goodies.

The mobile site is surprisingly functional, offering access to the QotD (Question of the Day), posts and media from your neighborhood, as well as a good portion of your administrative dashboard. The stand-alone mobile client for publishing - available for Windows Mobile 5, Palm OS and Series 60 1st/2nd Edition - is equally impressive. You have access to your phone's media and tools and the ability to customize just about every aspect of your posts; tags, visibility, the whole nine yards.

These two Vox goodies are impressive cross-platform offerings for such a new service (just recently out of beta), and I'm already getting even more hooked on Vox while away from my Mac. Thanks a lot, Six Apart.