Announcing "Wikizines" and the future of the magazine industry

Over the past few months we've had conversations with many of you and asked what Zimbio means to you.  It became clear that while we were doing something right, we weren't yet talking about it in the right way.  You wanted to know more about where Zimbio was headed as a company.

So with much of your help, today we've released improvements to our mission statement and to the vocabulary used on our site.  Our updated mission statement reads as follows:

"Our mission is to help you become an influential player in how stories are created, shaped and shared.

We enable our contributors to build wikizines - interactive magazines that anyone can create or edit - with coverage of current events, cultural reference points, and niche areas of interest. We make it simple for people to compile the web's most relevant and dynamic content into easily-searched topics, so readers can find and react to the full story from multiple perspectives."

So "portals" are now called "wikizines", which are basically wiki-based magazines. When testing the word "portal", you were confused by what it meant. "Wikizine" is not a known word (yet!), but you know what wikis are, and what magazines are, and for the most part, you get that we're a hybrid of the two. Hopefully you'll understand what Zimbio is trying to do when you hear that we're building the future of the magazine business - thousands of online niche publications, run by members, with articles, news, pictures, videos, etc, covering news and politics (similar to Time), pop culture (People), travel (Conde Nast Traveler) and special interests (Field and Stream). We're much more specific, much more interactive, and much more democratic. But this is the future of how people will read up on, follow, and share their stories and interests.

Zimbio is doing to magazines what Wikipedia did to the encylopedia.

Also, "Gurus" are now called "Editors" to better reflect their role, which is guiding community contributions rather than solely providing expertise on a specific subject.

So that's the big vocab change. Wikizines. Same great experience, but you might be able to better guess some of the new features coming down the pike.  And we can't wait to get to 'em.

To learn more about Zimbio, check out our Learn More or About Us pages.  And as always, we love to hear your feedback and suggestions.  Drop us a line at "support @ zimbio.com"