ADVERTISING based business models are always called “FREE”. We debated extensively on whether or not to follow the route of Google, facebook, Youtube, and many others to offer a free Pyxlin. In the end the choice was obvious:

3 reasons for not doing a “free” ad-based journal system:

• Profitable ad based models (”Free” models) required intrusive data mining that is not appropriate for personal journals (and Youtube is STILL NOT profitable).
• With a “free” model we would not be able to afford to provide you with person-to-person phone support (it is nice to know you can call rather than search through time consuming Help Systems)
• When was the last time you wanted to see banner ads plastered all over your journal? This allows you to control what is in your journal, or your kids journals for that matter. You don’t have to worry about inappropriate ads being displayed to you or your children.

Pyxlin is absolutely affordable, just $2.50 per month (less than a gallon of gas) to offset the costs of unlimited service (including unlimited phone support) and archiving. This allows us to focus completely on your experience, making sure that Pyxlin is the best journaling system in the world.

We now have a product page for Pyxlin Journals on facebook. You can let your friends know you are a fan of Pyxlin on facebook! We will be sending fans special offers and free stuff.

You can also become a friend of our fictional character, John Pyxlin.

One of my friends mentioned that at church she learned about “journaling jars”. I found this great example and description of a journaling jar at the jelly journals:

A Journal Jar is a jar that is filled to the brim with strips of cardstock that have questions printed or written on them, that are then rolled into little scrolls. These are the journal prompts. The idea is that each day you pull out one of the little scrolls and stick it at the top of a page in your journal and write your daily journal entry based on that question.

The Pyxlin Journaling System is by far the best system for typing, organizing, archiving, and publishing your personal journal. But we are far overdue for something like a digital “journal jar”. I started on the project last week. It didn’t take long for my creative juice reservoir to be completely depleted. Brainstorming for journaling prompts that are meant to help me brainstorm for journal entries was squeezing my brain. I needed to innovate. I had a brilliant idea!

I decided to use Amazon Mechanical Turk to create my prompts. I have used MTurk before for surveys and I know others who have used Mturk in clever ways as well. I am just asking each MTurker to write 5 journal prompts and then I pay them $0.05 for their work (take a look at the HIT here). So far they have come up with some fantastic prompts. In the end 1000 prompts will only cost me $11. Here are a few of the Prompts so far:

• Given the chance to give your child only one quality as a person, which would you choose? How about if that choice were unavailable, what would be your second and maybe third choices? Why are these so important to you?
• Which superpower would you choose to have if you had the option and why? Conversely, which superhero do you find to be the most overrated and why?
• Which amendment to the constitution is the most important to you and why?
• Is speech always free? When and where might it not be free?
• Put yourself in Anne Frank’s place how would you have survived?
• If you witnessed a fight at school would you report it? What could the repercussions be if you told the truth?
• What will be the first thing that you do when you get your driver’s license?
• You have one week to do whatever you want, all-expenses-paid, what things would you want to do? Where would you go?
• If your best friend came to you depressed and upset like you’ve never seen before, how would you react?
• In what ways do you sometimes wish to act to be a better friend, but don’t? Why do you find yourself unable to do these things?
• You have one hour to come up with the most interesting television show you can and describe/pitch it.
• “If someone gains, someone else loses.” How much does this reflect life, and how much does it come up short. Reflecting upon this, how could your attitudes have been different during events in your past?
• Would you be a different person today if you had a different childhood?
• Consider some of the parents others had growing up. What type of person would you be if you had those situations?
• What if you life had been harder or easier? How do you think you’d be different?
• Did I recently have an interesting conversation?
• What is a scary dream that I remember from my past?
• Who is the person that I feel has altered the course of my morals and values, and how did they effect me?
• Where do I see myself, so far as my goals, personal development, residence, or job, in five years, and do I have a plan to arrive at this destination?
• What is my earliest or happiest memory?

Liz and I were talking this morning, we are thinking to get over 1000 prompts for the Pyxlin journaling jar. Perhaps we could even ad a rating feature. Each time you use a Pyxlin prompt it would be nice if you could rate it with a thumbs/down or a 1-5 star rating. Over time has each of the journal prompts are rated thousands of times we will eventually have the best journal jar in the world.

What do you think? How would you like the Pyxlin Journal Jar to work? Let us know.

 Here are some other blogs I found interesting with journal prompts:

• Miriam at Ancestories2 does some family history prompts each week.
• Angela Booth keeps a blog on writing. Here are some of her prompts.
• Here is a Blog called Journal Writing in Math.
• Here’s one about journal prompts for kids.

Cheryl recently commented about pyxlin on Blooking Central. She posed this question:

Since pyxlin makes a very big deal about keeping private journals private AND they want you to start and end with pyxlin, they charge you for it. It’s only $30 a year [It is actually $20], but still … why would you?

I also responded to this comment about an ad based system in an earlier journal entry:

“…Rather than a monthly fee, some ad content may be acceptable as a way to generate revenue. If I live for 80 years, an annual fee over that timeframe is a big commitment, so less likely to commit to it.”

I suppose that if pyxlin were a blog this would make a great deal of sence. But pyxlin is nothing like a blog.

Personal journals or diaries contain the MOST personal information that any of us have. BBC just reported that proper ad based systems, like Google’s, are not so private at all.

There is the possibility that pyxlin could be more profitable if it would let spiders comb through your journal and then sell it for advertising purposes. But we care most about your security. Security is part of why pyxlin is has OpenID.

We are going to be offering you a very secure, encrypted, option that will not include ads. We want you to know that your journal is yours.

After a lot of privacy and security concerns we added this question to our survey:

What kind of security would you need to feel comfortable keeping your private journal online?

Here is the response (note: of the 1200+ people surveyed over 65% of them are bloggers!):

So our answer is easy. We must make pyxlin secure.

Considering that the ONLY concern of over 2000 people that we have surveyed was security for their personal journal online, this following statistic seems unbelievable! How could anyone feel comfortable with so much personal information on a blog?

A recent study showed that 37 percent of blogs are personal journals. Technorati’s most recent estimate of blogs world-wide is over 70 millions blogs! This means that approximately 25.9 millions blogs are used as personal journals.

For the same reason that pyxlin is going to include a MS Word Import, we hope to create a blog import for the purpose of easily sucking in digital personal journals and converting them into readable books for your posterity. This is the only reason we have created an import for bloggers, or “blooks” (blog + book). Pyxlin will turn your personal online diary in to a “personal journal blook”.

Related post: pyxlin vs blurb

MattD commented on Catherine’s blog entry about pyxlin’. Here is what he wrote:

…Blurb just released (a month or two ago) a “blog slurper” which is meant to do almost exactly what pyxlin seems to want to do: automatically create a hardbound book of your blog. I wonder what pyxlin will offer to make it different.

Great question Matt. I can see why you think these two applications might be the same, both Blurb and pyxlin print hardbound books and both have the ability to publish a blog or a blook (blog + book). Beyond the blook, pyxlin is different from blurb in pretty much every way.

Similarity - Blooks (i.e., blog import)

A recent study showed that 37 percent of blogs are personal journals. Technorati’s most recent estimate of blogs world-wide is over 70 millions blogs! This means that approximately 25.9 millions blogs are used as personal journals.

For the same reason that pyxlin is going to include a MS Word Import, we are creating a blog import for the purpose of easily sucking in digital personal journals and converting them into readable books for your posterity. This is the only reason we have created an import for bloggers. Pyxlin will turn your personal online diary in to a “personal journal blook”.

Blurb’s primary purpose in creating a blog import is to give the opportunity for bloggers to sell their countless hours of blogging in book form. For example, I would love to buy excerpts of Seth Godin’s blog in the form of a book. I hate reading on a computer all day. My eyes just begin to wig out on me.

blooks vs blooks

Beyond the fact that pyxlin’s personal journals are for personal use while Blurb’s books are made primarily for resell, there are significant differences between pyxlin and blurbs typesetting abilities. Typesetting is the part that makes the text and photos in your book look nice.

To help illustrate the differences I created a book on blurb and then copied what it looked like with pyxlin. As you can see below the differences in margins, leading, kerning, ligatures, small-caps, paragraphs, justification, headers & footers, captions, widows, orphans, and so on are extreme.

Here is a screen shot of Blurb’s system

(click to see a full image and break down of the differences):

pyxlin’s professional typesetting system powered by TeX:

*I used Latin Filler Text to create these example books.

Pyxlin is all online

Because pyxlin is all online, there is nothing to download to your computer. Sharing is easy. So is publishing because you don’t have to wait for a 2 hour upload when you are ready to publish, it is already there. Most surprising is that because it is online, it is actually even faster than blurb’s application when you are working with more than 100 pages of text.

Even though it would be difficult to consider pyxlin’s journals a direct competitor to blurb’s books, I hope that this post helps you understand the differences between the two companies.

Overall blurb is a sweet company—located in San Fransisco— with a great name, great prices, and loads of funding. I am excited to see how they turn out against our friends at LuLu, their main competitor. Blurb is an On-Demand self-publisher that is really built primarily for authors to create and resell their books.

Pyxlin is simply a journaling application that allows you to keep your personal journal online, drag in your favorite photos, and then publish a beautiful hardbound journal.

Pyxlin is owned by FamilyLearn Inc. FamilyLearn is a small family history company founded by Neal Harmon. Neal grew up on the potato farms of Idaho. What little funding we have comes from family and close friends. Half of us are still students at Brigham Young University. We are probably just too stupid to know better but we hope to make pyxlin work without venture capital funding.

The following is a brief history of TeX, the system that powers pyxlin. You will better understand why pyxlin is the solution to writing, printing, and binding your personal journal. Pyxlin is not like simple word processors, blogs, or cheap book making systems.

In 1969, Professor Donald Knuth, at Stanford University, published his first book. Knuth’s publisher produced a beautifully typeset book using the classical process, called mono-type, a century old technology for laying out the text in books. Years later, in 1977, he completed the manuscript for a new volume of his book. This time Knuth decided to try out the new computerized typesetting systems. He received the galley proofs–previews of what his book would look like–and compared them to the classical book he had previously published. The galley proofs were awful. After a futile search for a computerized typesetting solution, Knuth decided to take a year off his work to create the needed solution. He got hooked and he started on a 12 year journey creating TeX, one of the world’s most stable and advanced typesetting systems.

Related Post: pyxlin - powered by TeX

Typesetting is the single greatest challenge we have faced in creating pyxlin. Along side its sister application, MemoryPress, pyxlin is the world’s first online typesetting program.

Typesetting started with Johannes Gutenberg who invented movable type (seen above) to typeset the Bible. As you can see in the photo above, each letter had to be placed by hand in backwards order. Gutenberg’s invention of movable type was rated by LIFE Magazine as the single greatest event in history.

Pyxlin’s online typesetting application is powered by TeX. Unlike word processing applications, blogs, and email, pyxlin automatically takes care of details like, dates, alignment, spacing, font size, headers, footers, page numbers, and table of contents. Using pyxlin is like having a personal designer that worries about the visual aspect of your journal, so that you can devout your attention to journaling.

Typesetting separates pyxlin from blogs. Typesetting separates pyxlin from photobooks. Typesetting separates pyxlin from word processors.

Three powerful typesetting systems are responsible for almost every modern book, magazine, catalog, and newspaper you have ever seen or read: TeX, Quark Xpress ($749.00 software package), and Adobe InDesign ($699.00 software package). Hiring a professional typesetter to run these systems for you would only set you back $1,000 to $2,000 per book. Pyxlin delivers the power of TeX to your personal journal or diary, making it simple for you to create a book that even Gutenberg could be proud of.

Related post: History of TeX

Daniel (an advertising major at BYU) has been working on a little pyxlin’ cartoon movie. This movie is where John Pyxlin came from. The cartoon will be made in flash. “The animation will be similar to a simple South Park look.” Daniel told me.

We have already recorded the audio (a 1 min and a 30 sec) for the movie. Daniel has been working on the flash end. I have added little screen shots from the movie below.

BEFORE YOU GO ANY FURTHER CLICK TO LISTEN TO THE AUDIO IN THE TOP RIGHT—————————->

Click here to skip this post

If you actually made it this far, let us know what you think. Do you think the movie will work? If you have any more ideas we would love to hear them. As I said before, we plan to build the social part of pyxlin around this quirky little cartoon, John. We have already posted him on Facebook.

We have had some great comments in the Turk survey. Here are some interesting ones on handwritten journals:

“I consider my written personal journal a completely different animal than my blog. What makes my written journal unique is the fact that it’s handwritten and unproofed, which makes it most personal to me. I would never want it to be electronic, it would lose the qualities that make it special. “

I know that this is a concern for some because it has come up before. Here is my best answer:

I thought that this photo I used in our marketing presentation at BYU did a better job of answering this comment than anything. You can see Ben and myself in a car on the way home from California, we were driving about 80 mph. It is comparing Ben’s pyxlin journal with Ben’s old handwritten journal.

Here are some other comments from the survey:

“I think this is a really cool idea and love that the journals can be bound with text and photos!!! ”

“Was very interesting and fun to take.”

“This sounds like a great idea.”

“Sorry, just not a blogger or a journal writer.”

“Very good survey, simple to take.” (thank you)

“Neat idea but I have never really had a journal. Requires too much commitment. I can imagine it would be a nice gift for someone.”

“interesting service if this ever comes into fruition”

“I think this is a good service but I dont really keep a journal or write any blogs. I can definately see value in the service and I think its a great idea. The question of course is how much people would be willing to pay.”

“This is a great idea - but I don’t think you can charge all the services in one bundle. Some people wouldn’t want to publish, others would probably want to publish quite frequently. Maybe a two-tier cost system for those who do and don’t want to publish? Awesome idea, though… “

We love your comments. I have saved a few that talk about: the system being FREE, keeping your journals on your PC or Mac, and those who think pyxlin is just a blog. Stay tuned.

If you have any ideas to help us out, we would love to hear them.