The 48hr Magazine

Ideas are awesome and frankly this idea makes some other ideas look a little less awesome. As the name suggests The 48 Hour Magazine was written, photographed, illustrated, designed and edited in two days - in the projects own words it is a "a raucous experiment in using new tools to erase media's old limits"

By now if you are not in awe of this audacious attempt at changing the rules and boundaries of publishing there is something wrong.  If you followed the project (mostly through Twitter, their blog and UStream) you would have picked up on the energy and excitement around the project - mostly because it provoked a large community of writers, photographers and illustrators to poke their heads out of the woodwork.

In the ten days before the attempt at creating a magazine in 48 hours over 6,000 people signed up to take part with only the tittle of the first issue (Hustle) to go on. If that sounds amazing consider that over 1,500 submissions were received during the 48 hours of production time - thats one massive pool of creativity and a brilliant use of the crowd!

Not only has this project proved that there are so many possibilities for the publishing industry to grow using new media  tools and technologies but it has showen that you can get thousands of people together to create something for the pure joy of doing so. The 48 Hour Magazine team was lead by some quite high profile people in the journalism and publishing industry, props to them for driving this project so well. If you are interested check out this interview with them on Gizmodo.

Incase you are wondering, you can get hold of a physical copy of the first issue on MagCloud and all the contributors can be found here.