Moveable type

For those of you playing at home, we’re officially living in a post-post blog world:

As old media races to catch up with the Web and figure out how to successfully monetize print content online, one publication is taking a drastically different approach: web to print.

The Printed Blog, a
startup founded and funded by former business productivity software
entrepreneur Joshua Karp, is launching a twice-daily free print
newspaper in cities across the country aggregating localized blog posts. 

“Why hasn’t anyone tried to take the best content and bring it offline?” said Karp, who thinks print media is far from dying.  (from Wired.com)

You can’t see me, but I’m rolling my eyes dramatically.

There are many funny things about printing blog entries, top of the list being that somehow “getting” one’s words in print validates blogger-as-writer, whereas having a blog, no matter how high both readership numbers and quality of content are, does not (yet) carry the same distinctions. This makes sense, of course, because anyone can have a blog and presumably not everyone can be hired by a publication (though, technically, anyone can start their own publication, Exhibit A above), so there’s a level of selection involved. But, at this point, I believe we’re all thinking a bit more broadly about these things.

Tone, entry (“essay”, “column”?) length and hyperlinks are interesting to consider when printing blogs as well. The kind people at Gramophone printed an entry from this blog in their September 2008 issue (imagine my surprise when Simone Dinnerstein was on the cover and not I, but whatevs), and it was truly bizarre to see the entry in print! First, I was a little embarrassed by my own chatty tone. Great, I thought: I’m in Gramophone and I wrote “What the Joshua Bell…”.  I’m not embarrassed by such things in a web format (“Maybe you should be!” -Commenter Meanie Goat), so do I have a double standard? Given the choice, would I have written a “better”, or at least more serious, essay for a publication? Other strange bits about my entry in print form: obviously the hyperlinks, an important part, were gone, and there was no comment field, though I suppose ‘Letters to the Editor’ serves as kind of a long-range comment field. There were comments attached to the entry when the editors pulled it, so I was actually curious to see if they would include them in the print version. They didn’t, which begs the question: is a blog entry complete without the comments that go with it, and more specifically, do the comments actually become part of a blog entry?

Speaking of Gramophone, they’ve launched an online archive! Woot woot! Every single issue (from April 1923 to the present) is available and searchable. It’s also free, which was a good call on their part.

So now my blog entry has been picked up, printed, and placed back online. Circle of life, my friends, circle-of-life.