InfoWorld reinvents Web publishing!

Megan Fox, Jon Gosselin, and Balloon Boy offer hip-hop tribute to Web innovation on "Dancing with the Stars"

Thanks to the celebrity keyword-fest preceding these words, this blog post will get gobs more traffic than articles about IT normally get. And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with Web publishing.

Celebrities are celebrities because hundreds of millions of people watch them and read about them and Google them.  Fewer people -- many, many fewer -- seek out info about IT. For too long, the business of the Web has been the business of page views, no matter what the subject matter or who it's for. Page views do not differentiate between a teen who arrives by mistake (Sorry dude! No Megan Fox here!) and, say, a datacenter architect who really wants to know what InfoWorld contributing editor Paul Venezia has to say.

[ To browse our first volley of downloadable content, go to InfoWorld Deep Dive Reports. ]

InfoWorld's mission is to supply IT professionals with the information they need to do their work and (so we like to think) amuse them along the way. This is our community and we are proud to serve it -- and we are grateful it delivers to us all the page views we need. But we want to extend beyond that model and double down on the deep content our readership demands.

You can check out our first efforts at this in a new section: InfoWorld Deep Dive Reports. Here you'll find five free PDFs written by InfoWorld editors and contributors, including a technical examination of Windows 7 and a 28-page aggregation of our iPhone coverage from an enterprise perspective. This is only the beginning. Over time we plan to deliver deep, downloadable content across all core areas of concern for IT.

Now, obviously, InfoWorld and others have offered the PDF download option for years. The difference is that we will make this format a strategic part of our Web publishing efforts going forward, beginning with downloadable reports on the enterprise data explosion and how to deal with it. We won't merely be recycling content first published in a paper magazine or in HTML, but creating original material specifically for download. (We've even published our Windows 7 Deep Dive in Kindle format.)

Study after study shows that most people don't like reading long-form material on Web pages. But the online equivalent of print, whether PDF, Kindle, Plastic Logic, or some other format yet to be created, lends itself to focusing on, reading, and digesting the material. Watch this space and send me your suggestions for other Deep Dives. (And if you want pictures of Megan Fox, go here.)

This story, "InfoWorld reinvents Web publishing!," was originally published at InfoWorld.com.