In June, 2007, I was contacted by a representative of Newstex and asked if I wanted the company to syndicate this blog. I agreed and, since that time, I have received modest quarterly royalty checks based on the number of LexisNexis customers who have chosen to read some of my blog notes. I should also mention that there are a number of web sites such as Reuters that publish RSS feeds from Blogburst of some of my blog notes without royalty payments. I have agreed to this and it does not bother me in the least -- I am pleased that my notes are of interest to other web sites. I also respect Newstex for having offered to develop a royalty syndication relationship with Lab Soft News.
There were the following two interesting comments in the Newstex monthly royalty report to me:
- This is also the first month we are reporting royalties for the Amazon Kindle and Cengage Gale. We are slowly rolling out the Newstex blogs to both the Amazon Kindle and Cengage Gale, so if you don't see your blog this month, please be patient as we are adding new blogs each month.
- If you have Videos with original content and they do not contain any copyright material (ie clips from commercial television) we want to license your content. Your video can be on any topic including commentary, satire, documentary - but please no personal videos. Videos can be of any length or format.
As you probably know, Kindle is a wireless reading device that has been developed by Amazon.com that is growing in popularity. I am very intrigued by the idea that such a device might be used by professionals in various fields. They could subscribe to various blogs, newsletters, and newspapers that would then be "pushed" down to the device at intervals or as news breaks. The Kindle owner would exercise control over the information accessed, selecting only the feeds that suits his/her needs and provide the most valuable information and analysis.
Now throw into this mix the idea of experts in a field such as the clinical lab industry developing content-rich videos that would provide answers to some of the challenging questions facing lab managers or medical technologists in their jobs. I am currently experimenting with the production of mini-videos using PowerPoint files plus Camtasia Studio. This latter software allows the author of PowerPoint files to generate a companion audio track to annotate and explain each of the slides in the presentation. Such "consultation" videos could be ordered by the owner of the Kindle if and when there was a need for an answer to a pressing problem. If such mini-videos were offered for a small fee, I would expect that the company providing them would also provide on-line reviews of each of them from past users about their value.
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