Posted by How great would it be to grab all of your favourite Blogs, dump them into one site and have all of that content formatted into your own personal magazine?
Enter: Tabbloid.
Here’s how it works:
1. Enter the Blog URLs or feeds that you like.
2. Select when you would want your own personal magazine delivered to you.
3. On schedule, you get emailed a print-ready PDF.
It works, it looks great, it has a very clean and nice design, it’s a one-step process and it’s completely free.
Tabloid is an HP "hatchling project" (I was unable to find any info on what, exactly, a hatchling project is) and it speaks to three recent issues we’ve discussed on this Blog.
1. Marketing Needs To Shift From Trick To Treat – HP looked at the space, defined an opportunity and simply put it out there. No tricks. Nothing about buying more printers or printer cartridges. No asking you to sign up to receive additional promotional material from HP. It was a treat – for both customers and not-yet-customers.
2. The Feeding Frenzy Has Just Begun – This is a perfect example of how consumers can simply input a Blog URL and get something brilliant as a result. Even though the core technology is RSS (or feeds), it’s not apparent (or important) to the consumer. The technology is transparent and it is applications and tools like this that will make RSS continually more important.
3. The Power Behind A Faith-Based Initiative – HP created and is giving away this product without asking their consumers for anything. They’re doing this because they have faith that if people like this and use this that they will thank HP by buying their products. Also, the nature of this specific application is to print the final output. HP is all about printing. It’s a strong brand value alignment.
If you find that you don’t have enough time to read all of your feeds, check out Tabbloid and see if publishing your own personal magazine and reading them when you’re not on a computer (travelling, on the couch, sitting on a park bench, etc…) creates a whole new experience with your content.
(hat tip – Steve Rubel – Micro Persuasion).
Never another podcast episode or article 
Give it away and get them into the funnel. Product funnel aka “hatching product”…whatever. It’s probably one of the smartest things HP has done in a while.
Great idea. It’s a pity image files aren’t able to be printed out yet. That would make for a very fine output.
Wow! Just checked this out. It’s a pretty cool idea. Time will tell if I use it regularly, but I’m certainly going to try.
I’m thankful there are no images… much better to just have the text.
I really like this idea. I just hope that they promote it and put the word out there.
Someone on Twitter mentioned copyright about the content being used, etc… that’s another angle I never thought of. I wonder if that will be a problem?
Mitch
Take your point about usefulness of text only, but I’d still like the option of images.
Good point about copyright. On Creative Commons licensed material, does the license extend to print-out of online content?
I saw this over at Steve Rubel’s too — novel idea. I like the typeface they use.
Very interesting project and a smart business move for a printer manufacturer as everything moves towards becoming paper-free. I like the idea, but can’t justify printing something out that I can read on-screen. (Think of the trees….)
Seems like a good idea but I agree with the save the trees comment. I’m going to try it thought minus printing and see if it works for me.
sounds pretty cool… and the best part is that it’s free 😀
-jack
I completely agree that idea is great, but I also have doubts about copyright and printing. Though, rather attractive thing.