On May 1, Communications of the ACM, the flagship magazine of the Association for Computing Machinery, introduced its first Web site. The magazine's digital content was previously distributed primarily through the association's digital library, said Scott Delman, group publisher of the ACM Media Group.

The site offers daily news from ACM technical writers and an in-house news staff, as well as feeds from the Associated Press and other news services. It also hosts content from the current issue of the magazine, as well as the complete archive of 50 years of issues.

"In the past, we would publish static content in print, PDF or HTML form; so, having the ability for people to interact online on a real-time basis was very important," Delman said. Users can comment on stories and blogs, e-mail them or share them via Digg, Facebook, LinkedIn, Slashdot or 60 other services.

The new site also has an expert blog and a blog roll linking to computing and IT bloggers elsewhere on the Web.

Multimedia capabilities will be built out, Delman said. "There is video very deep within some of the sections, but it's in our plans to put video on the front page," he said. "Multimedia components tend to drive traffic better than static content."

Print and online subscriptions are included in the membership fee for the not-for-profit association, which has more than 90,000 members worldwide. "We take advertising, but we are not dependent on it," Delman noted.