July 26, 2021

Small critics of the Servo magazine

 The Servo magazine https://www.servomagazine.com/ is the only remaining printed robot magazine available. Possible alternatives like the Robot Magazine from Maplegate were terminated because of missing readership. In contrast, the Servo magazine is up and running since the year 2003. .Each issue has around 90 pages and the articles are equipped with high quality picture. The topic is mostly hardware dominated tipps about how to build physical toy robots and in addition some articles are published about the history of robotics which includes academic projects like Shakey the robot.

So what is wrong with the Servo magazine? The problem is that even the content is future ready the magazine looks outdated. It has much in common with a homecomputer magazine from the late 1980s. Not because the articles are written so bad or more advanced topics are missing but because the principle of a magazine is out dated. The better idea would be to extract a single article and put it into a separate space. Instead of publishing one issue with 10 articles the better idea would be to publish 10 article with each 9 pages. There is no need to aggregate different articles from the wide area of robotics into a single magazine.