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Printing the Web
GraphicBrain.com Vertical Search Engine
Emerging Service Directory Architecture
Sunday, January 19, 2003
Demand-driven Print
CafePress announces entry into demand-driven publishing arena; if you publish, print, distribute, or sell books you better pay attention. This will affect you. Not that CafePress will be a major book publishing player, but it represents another step toward general acceptance of the demand-driven model, and another opportunity to hone the process.What separates CafePress from all the other Internet-based demand-driven publishers (Xlibris, iUniverse, 1stBooks, BookSurge, etc.) is their focus on the general promotional market. They sell promotional items. And books, CDs, DVDs, etc. are great promo items in media- and knowledge-based markets.
I'm curious to learn just who will manage the production for CafePress, as there are only a handful of companies in the US who can actually manufacture on demand (as opposed to short-run or micro-inventory) for a reasonable price. And none of them are on the west coast. (But given CafePress is in San Leandro, I can hazard a guess...)
CafePress to do books. CafePress is branching out into print-on-demand books, CDs and DVDs.
He does, however, tell me CafePress has exciting plans to expand into publishing in early 2003: The company's media-services division will offer print-on-demand books, audio CDs and DVDs. Using the same general principle, it'll produce, to order, your novel, album or film with glossy covers and jewel-box inserts, a move that has revolutionary possibilities. And though self-publishing already exists on the Web, CafePress has honed the production-and-fulfillment process to make it far more viable.(Thanks, Derryl) [Boing Boing Blog]
Printing the Web
"Consider how extraordinary paper is: lightweight and flexible, it supports thousands of typefaces, as well as black-and-white and color illustrations, and its high-resolution and high contrast facilitates reading." -- and so begins an excellent Boxes and Arrows article on one of the most important topics in publishing.Print isn't going away -- not in our lifetime, if ever. But we are only beginning to grasp the importance of integrating the physical and digital forms of information, or understand how to do so. This article opens with some good background and references supporting this concept, then moves on to more practical aspects of the problems and current solutions for integrating the web and print -- in particular, the use of CSS and XSL-FO to avoid maintaining separate versions of data. Well-written and with excellent resources, this article is well worth reading.
Thanks to James Robertson at Column Two:
Printing the web. James Kalbach talks about designing websites that can be printed, either by making the one page work on paper, or by providing an alternate "printable version". Sounds pretty mundane, but there's a lot of good tips in this article. [Column Two]
Saturday, January 18, 2003
GraphicBrain.com Vertical Search Engine
Interesting idea -- a vertical industry search engine for the graphic arts. There may be similar tools in other industries but this is the first I've come across.I couldn't find a complete list of sources anywhere on the site, and a couple of quick query results showed a lot of repetition within relatively few sources. But the service does have some nice features, including the ability to save queries, define agents to update queries, sort results, and specify types of content for constraining the search. Registration is required for full access. I didn't see any mention of fees for registering to use the search engine.
I'd be more skeptical (downright cynical, actually) if this were an American venture, but it's run by VIGC, a private initiative backed by the Flemish government and the European Regional Development Fund. VIGC has about a dozen Euro graphic arts mfgs as members, but appears to be mostly trying to sell consulting services.
GraphicBrain.com adds daily updated overview of articles with links[...] GraphicBrain.com visits over 30 news sites on a daily basis, all dedicated to the industry. The overview is freely accessible to all users.
"This is of course a major improvement of our service", says Eddy Hagen, manager GraphicBrain.com. Until recently, most of the information in GraphicBrain.com came from vendor websites and from on-line magazines. The GraphicBrain.com 'web spiders' visit vendor sites on a monthly basis and on-line magazine on a weekly basis. So it could take some time before information on new products was retrievable via the GraphicBrain.com search engine. With the addition of this 'news' section, new information is added to its database every day." [...] [WhatTheyThink]
Monday, January 13, 2003
Emerging Service Directory Architecture
Very cool, very now -- emerging service directory architecture for Small-Medium Business: Go get the white paper.
SMBmeta Initiative.David Weinberger scoops the SMBmeta Initiative by Dan Bricklin. This metadata scheme allows small and medium size businesses to express their identity in XML. David rightly points out why this approach is so smart:
- Dan doesn't want to own the data
- It's free for anyone to aggregate
- Its extensible
What I also like (from the whitepaper, which also provides a great account on why RSS is a success):
- It is low cost, but has a cost to prevent spam (an economic problem)
- It doesn't attempt to serve large enterprises
- Simple and open
- Its decentralized, but has leadership behind it
If you want more information, go to the new TrellixTech web site. There you'll find a blog, the spec, and a highly readable paper on the topic. [Joho]via [Ross Mayfield's Weblog]
The printing industry has tried to do something like this several times over the years, and keeps getting big pieces of it wrong. But they aren't alone. There's a post on Dan's weblog from Elliot Noss, CEO of TUCOWS,
"The SMBmeta proposal sounds really cool! I've had hundreds of people propose ways to get a business directory created over the years but this is the first one that makes sense to me. It's open and distributed like the Internet should be. We're going to look at this closely and figure out how we can help our registrants and resellers take advantage of it."
This is perfect for the publishing and graphic arts industries. For several years a company I worked with kicked around the idea of a "service bus" architecture, a term I think came from someone at HP, but it never got off the ground. The idea was a dynamic directory that would allow editors, artists, cover designers, writers, proof readers, literary agents, printers, binders, distributors, etc. to all plug in a description of their skills and services -- along with a pricing structure -- to create a publishing services marketplace. The idea was stillborn because no one could come up with a suitable structure. This is the first one I've seen that makes sense, and I can see already how it might be extended for special uses within vertical industries.
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