Flipboard is a popular app for the iPad and Android devices that presents information in a magazine layout.

Users can subscribe to different topics, with the content pulled in from the links tweeted by their friends on Facebook and Twitter. They can also view Web sites and blogs (if they contain a RSS feed) as an online magazine.

Flipboard has just released version 2 of its application, which enables users to create their own magazines by clipping content from a variety of different Web sites.

In other words, brands can now curate their own selections and publish these in a consistent and elegant looking format. Flipboard will create a cover for your magazine with “pull out” headlines, and it will notify you if other people have commented on the items you have included in your magazine.

According to Flipboard, since its launch, their users have been creating one magazine per second.

For Technical Authors, this means you could easily deliver online Help, training, user generated and support content in an attractive looking format.

According to The Daily Telegraph:

This latest move marks an even bigger, more significant step, taking the principle of a personalised and interactive internet, and bringing that to mainstream content delivery…This move confirms that the nature of content delivery is changing. It’s no longer about capturing crowds of many, but the audience of one. This audience of one doesn’t care about the usual magazine and newspaper release schedules, or about trawling through multiple sites to find the articles of most interest; it wants to read its favourite piece of content when it wants, and how it wants and values the curation of like-minded tastemakers, who provide a means to discover new content and cut through the clutter.

You can already view the Cherryleaf Blog as a Flipboard magazine (in Flipboard, just search on Cherryleaf or http://www.cherryleaf.com/blog/feed/), and you’ll also find a test magazine we’ve created called “The MadCap Writer”.

Let us know what you think of the potential for using Flipboard in User Assistance.

See also: Cherryleaf content strategy services