I love reading magazines. I like short, thought-provoking articles about different subjects with relevant
illustrations, graphs, diagrams or photos. For me, magazine articles are perfect bite-sized pieces of information that either satisfy my curiosity or inspire me to further research a topic. I depend
on magazine articles to report the latest trends in all areas of education, especially education technology.
I’m pretty happy if I flip through a magazine and up to 50% is relevant and interesting to me. In a perfect world, I would be able to create my own magazine containing 100% of articles in
subjects in which I have an interest.
Enter an app called, “Zite”, an intelligent e-zine that you create by choosing the subjects in which you are interested. Zite presents articles in those areas in your own customized e-zine. For each
article, you have the opportunity to choose a “thumbs-up” icon to show you want to see similar articles or a “thumbs-down” icon to show you do not want to see similar articles.
Zite uses that information to customize your the articles it presents to match your interests even more precisely.
Unfortunately, Zite won’t be around forever. It has been acquired by Flipboard.
Though the two apps are similar, they are not interchangeable. Flipboard is part news and magazine app and part social media app. It’s content comes from social networks, news publications and blogs. The ultimate plan is for Flipboard and Zite to be merged into an app that captures the best features from both apps. Until then (maybe 6 months out) I’ll be reading Zite.
Which app do you prefer? Zite? Flipboard? Or, another app?
