With Australian Macworld no longer publishing a summary of the Disc of the Month listing as their “Off The Net” column, new opportunities will present themselves for distributing and promoting the DotM’s.

One of the most requested options from Apple User Group Leaders regarding distributing the Disc of the Month has been an online version of the Disc of the Month.

Due to the nature of way the Discs are compiled, this hasn’t been practical – what with the Disc Image been 700MB in size, it has hasn’t been practical to make these generally available.

And I never saw the point of MUGs trying to maintain their own mirrors of all the software contained on the Discs – when a simple list of URLs to the original files would do the same job, far more effectively.

However, I wasn’t in a position to release the Disc of the Month Listing with the URLs included to MUGs due to copyright agreements with Niche Media.

Now though, I am prepared to continue to producing a listing of the Disc of the Month contents that contains the URLs to the individual product pages of the included applications and MUGs will be able to publish that list in a “Members Only” place ie behind a password protected area of your website or to your mailing list.

This will take effect as of the October 2009 Disc, as the September listing will still be published by Australian Macworld.

So soon Australian Apple User Groups will have the option of distributing the Disc of the Month as a physical CD or as a listing of files. Stay tuned for more news.