If not, you’re going to want to soon. Read on for a closer look at how the founders of Convozine is solving the lonely blogosphere experience.

Hometown: San Francisco, New York
Current Residence: San Francisco, CA
Occupation: Entrepreneurs, designers and engineers
Areas of Focus: Communities, Publishing and Social Media
Website: http://convozine.com/explore

What is the story of Convozine? Why the need for zines?

Dan: We built Convozine out of a desire to do something very creative, and different in the social media space. Many people find the social web too trivial. There is very little room for longer form and richer media expressions; and too much noise and emphasis on the catchy and trite.

Convozine is our attempt to build a platform that combines the best elements of magazines with the immediate and diverse human connectivity made possible through the internet. Zines provide a way for people to collectively communicate and share content in a format that has the kind of typographical and clean design that raises its importance and promotes its lasting value. Blogs can be very isolating and hard to maintain over time. Zines, in contrast, are community enabled from the outset and thus less reliant on a difficult to maintain one-to-many structure.

We see the print-magazine industry changing very rapidly and think that magazines as a medium can benefit from the crowd-source-power of the internet. Much as Wikipedia transformed the encyclopedia, there’s a pending revolution coming in how higher-end magazine content is created and sourced. There are a myriad of would-be publishers who can contribute to tomorrows next-gen magazines. Our hope is to be a key player in this evolution.

Joe: We also saw that blogging, an eleven year old technology, was due for a reboot. There are already over 147M blogs and most people find blogging to be a lonely experience. But 9.6% of Americans still try. We wanted to provide a community based alternative — that is better at developing and surfacing high-quality content. Based on both interest-based and social relevancy.

How did your team come together?

Joe: I know Dan from a start up incubator that is no longer in SF. I had been thinking about online collaboration and communication. Dan had prototyped a conversation engine. Mo and Dan had previously volunteered together at a non-profit in SF. We fit well philosophically in that we all wanted to do something creatively oriented with high design values.

Mo: Our team came together through mutual friendships and respect for each other’s work.

What motivates Convozine users to create zines on the site?

Mo: Convozine users should be motivated by the ease of developing and cultivating an online presence and community around an interest. Our platform supports users who want to deliver rich layered content, which includes featured articles, discussions and sections.

Joe: It’s also really fun and interesting. You have to learn how to attract creative people with a clear and compelling editorial vision. And curate a product for your audience.

Dan: Zines are really an intriguing alternative to blogs in that a really strong zine concept could motivate content from a community that is global in nature. Ie., one need not already have, or expect to create, a ton of pre-made content to run a flourishing and dynamic zine. Zines are latent community engines.

In running Convozine, what is the most difficult or time-consuming work?

Joe: One of the main draws for publishing on Convozine is the in-network audience. We’ve had to scale the viewership proportionately with the content creators. The community is starting to engage itself now, which is providing a base for growth.

Another urgent, critical task was to develop a community culture with high expectations for quality. We want to avoid some of the noisiness of mainstream social media and we knew the users would soon take over. We invested heavily in visual design, developed our own high quality content and targeted professional artists, writers and photographers in our outreach. It appears to have worked so far — many of the new beta zines created by the community have high aesthetics and sophisticated editorial visions.

Mo: For me, the most time consuming work comes from evolving the site, graphically. I tend to spend a lot of time studying behavior on the site and designing around how people are using the site and potentially how they want to use it in the future.

Dan: Developing the next gen of functionality while maintaining a momentum with the current feature set has been challenging.

What were some of the technical challenges to the development of the site and how did you overcome these aspects?

Dan: Convozine is a pretty complex and involved web site technically with: publishing tools, zine community management, and social connectivity features. And we’re a small team with only one coder so building something of this scale takes quite a lot of time. More than anything though, the most challenging aspect of the project is creating a design and user experience that balances magazine-like, clean, aesthetics with robust, yet easy to use, functionality.

Finding the right balance across the site has required a slew of near total redesigns and pivots to get to where we are now with realizing the mission of the product. The marriage of design and technology is a very tricky dance and can’t be forced. But the reward when it works is tremendous.

What is Convozine’s business model, or anticipated business model?

Joe: We plan to offer pro accounts later this year. As people become better at publishing, we can offer additional services and features for super-users. We’re thinking about ways to monetize zines such as a system for editors to sell inventory for sponsored convos.

Dan: We will also be enabling people to target different delivery platforms such as mobile/tablet, but also print which we feel might yet provide some unique, untapped opportunities.

What is next for you guys?

Mo: We still have a lot of areas to work on. In the immediate future, fixing bugs, tightening the UI are big priorities. In the near future, I would love to invite judges to our contests, provide a robust posting system and an array of layout options for users. For the rest you’ll just have to stay tuned.

Dan: One of the most exciting things about Convozine for me is that the platform can evolve in so many intriguing ways. What we have delivered is very much the tip of the iceberg. Zines can become more and more useful without being heavy or complex; so we definitely have a slew of plans for how to continue to push the envelope for enabling creative and community-centric publishing on the web.

Joe: ConvoFilms has a nice sound to it.