Do you have exponential media content?

Watched this great video titled, “Did You Know?” (9,459,742 views!) on the way technology is changing our landscape in truly incredible ways. Which led me to this related presentation, “Did you Know 4.0“:

Newspaper publishing and magazine ad revenue naturally was down in 2009, but so was TV and radio. While mobile phone advertisement and Internet advertisement sales increased. Social media will only increase these figures in 2010 is my guess.

Here are both videos embedded. We live in exponential times for sure. Amazing:

Have a great weekend and do not forget to be social, which has very little to do with media, now does it?

What are your exponential media strategies? Do you have exponential media content?

We reported back a couple weeks ago in a post titled, “Adobe drops Print Service Provider Program – a Quark opportunity?” the news that was seemingly not going over well with printers and print-shops around the world. Since then, we have seen it turn to outrage, such as this piece (Adobe, you’re breaking my heart) from print-industry guru Frank Romano.

Thus, in all fairness, it is good to also get the Adobe side of things. Which you can in this article from WhatTheyThink.com, who has offered excellent reporting on this news byte:

http://members.whattheythink.com/articles/article.cfm?id=41758

Now, we all know that the Apple tablet is to be announced today (With or without epub format support is the question! [good Q Roelof Janssen!]). Could it be that Adobe sees print drying up and all publishing switching to Steve Job’s latest innovation? I doubt Adobe PDF or InDesign will be dropped soon at all and as a matter of a fact, what moves Apple makes with this new “iSlate” (I hope it is not called that really, as many are saying) could rub Adobe’s hairs the wrong way.  Read more... (254 words, 1 image, estimated 1:01 mins reading time)

Received this InMail from a connection on Linkedin, one of the many in response to our popular post on the history of desktop publishing late last week and wanted to share it with you all… Congratulations Mike!

Re: Desktop Publishing turns 25…
From: Mike Hilton
Date: January 24, 2010
To: David Dilling

Hi David,

And so too is Graphic Repro – having launched in SA in 1985 – the year everything started to move from Electronic Publishing…

Best regards,
Mike Hilton

>> Regarding David Dilling LinkedIn Status:: David Desktop Publishing turns 25 ? Aldus-Adobe-Macromedia-Quark. Timeline: http://bit.ly/8xo3EA (Fitting w/ Apple tablet on way)

This is shared with Mike’s permission and he added that one can learn more about the history of Graphic Repro magazine and it’s present day online site and thus printing via the hyper link.

Personally I will add that his weekly email newsletter is a must-read. I like the jam-packed format filled with the latest news from not only the South African print, prepress and publishing market, but really from the world. The “Technology-related articles” near the bottom is nice to keep an eye on as well!  Read more... (202 words, 1 image, estimated 48 secs reading time)

A bit below on this entry is what I just posted in our Group within the Linkedin.com professional networking site. If you are a free participant of Linkedin, please become a member of our open graphic arts group today. First though, it may be good for those not 100% familiar with this site, to see why it is so important.

Here is a practical article about “why” Linkedin, which also highlights Moo.com a print media company and the CEO, Richard Moross:

“Moo.com is a printing and graphics company. Its CEO has a LinkedIn professional profile that lists his professional affiliations, which demonstrate his expertise in printing and graphics. There’s also an “I Love Moo.com” profile at LinkedIn (accessible to LinkedIn account holders) for customers of Moo.com.”
Source & full Article: Use LinkedIn To Promote Your Online Store

If you do not have a profile on Linkedin.com yet, I highly recommend you join Linkedin today (check this out too). Righty-o, onto how you can join up with Markzware there and connect with us personally as well:

LinkedIn Groups

Markzware User Group for Graphic Design, Publishing and Print

Subject: Announcement from Markzware User Group for Graphic Design, Publishing and Print  Read more... (421 words, 2 images, estimated 1:41 mins reading time)

Since ICANN, approved the use of non-Latin characters in domain names today, I thought we would stick on the Internet side with this post. Jörg Oyen, the publishing, Adobe and Quark QPS expert friend of ours over in Germany at Oyen.de, sent me a rather ominous Instant message on Skype the other day, “Do you like balls”? he asked. For some reason, I thought, “oh, must be Google Balls” for it sounds very Googlish (sp?) No, he meant Tagul balls or Tagul meta clouds. Here, you can see Jörg’s meta ball from his site here:

Here is the Markzware meta data cloud (no mystery here):

Beware! This Markzware cloud is not complete and this is limitation of Tagul only getting the first 350 keywords or something to that effect. We see FlightCheck in there, but no Q2ID or ID2Q, our popular Quark-to-InDesign and the other way around as well, conversion tools.

Want to see how we made this? Watch the video here, for good control over your meta data, keywords and general SEO is very important for graphic designers, publishers and printers alike (Yes, print-shops included!):

“Electronic books may transform publishing industry” read the title on MarketWatch.com and the tag-line was, “Executives discuss impact of e-books at Frankfurt Books Fair.”

By Polya Lesova, MarketWatch

FRANKFURT (MarketWatch) — Electronic books may transform not only the publishing industry, but the very definition of what constitutes a book. E-books — whether read on an iPhone, a Kindle or a laptop — are a hot topic at this week’s Frankfurt Book Fair.

“Books are just devices. Wikipedia is the new Britannica,” said Ronald Schild, managing director of Germany-based MVB Marketing- und Verlagsservice des Buchhandels GmbH.

“Digital content is superior in many ways,” Schild said Thursday at a panel discussion on electronic books at the fair. “Reading today is solitary process, but there are many other ways of reading. [In the future,] it may become more of a conversation.”

While electronic books still account for only a small part of global publishing, their popularity is growing. Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN ) , which sells the electronic-book reader Kindle, is facing growing competition from other e-reader producers. In addition, many users are reading electronic content on their laptops, PCs and multi-functional mobile devices such as Apple Inc.’s (AAPL 189.91, -1.39, -0.72%) iPhone.  Read more... (692 words, estimated 2:46 mins reading time)

This was a very nice image that our Swiss distributor, Kursiv, designed for their FlightCheck Professional v6.5 Swiss German mailing. Check it out; and for those from Switzerland, you may want to see the text below, for there are some great offers on stand-alone preflighting for multiple desktop publishing file formats via FlightCheck:

Preflighting für (fast) alles

Sicherheit in der Produktion – das erreichen Sie durch standardisierte Arbeitsabläufe. Eingehende oder ausgehende Dokumente können auf Fehler untersucht werden. FlightCheck Pro prüft alle wichtigen Dokumentformate aus der Druckvorstufe – sogar ohne dass Sie über die Originalprogramme verfügen müssen.

FlightCheck Pro 6.5
FlightCheck Professional 6.5 ist die neueste Version von Markzware’s Preflighting Tool, welches sowohl offene Dokumentformate (XPress 3–8, InDesign bis CS4, Word, Illustrator, usw.) als auch Ausgabeformate wie EPS, PDF und PDF-X prüft.

FlightCheck Professional läuft als eigenständiges Programm, und Dokumente werden durch einfaches Drag-and-Drop auf das Programm-Icon geprüft. Dafür müssen die Originalprogramme nicht installiert sein. Flightcheck Pro generiert sofort einen vollständigen Report gemäss Ihren Einstellungen. Perfekt für Ihre AVOR.
FlightCheck Pro unterstützt auch eine Batchverarbeitung mehrerer Dateien, und lässt sich durch Presets einfach für verschiedene Aufgaben konfigurieren.  Read more... (270 words, 1 image, estimated 1:05 mins reading time)

Now, I am quite sure there is more to this than meets the eyes.. or is this a sign of the Internet times we live and work in?

“…Please use either WordPress or InDesign. Don’t know of any other students using Blogger…“

said @scost1 on Twitter, apparently to a student- is this the ‘new world order of Graphic Design‘?

Source: http://twitter.com/barbaranixon/statuses/4788759496

Just a little WordPress or Adobe InDesign chatter on Twitter! Don’t even get me started on Google Wave. Sounds like this school and it’s students could use content conversion and text extraction provided by PageZephyr.com…

Don’t forget that you can also follow Markzware’s Tweets on Twitter here:
http://twitter.com/Markzware

“Content is free. Formats are not” is the article’s title from cnet. Now, this strays away from purely printing, although content in the digital printing world and certainly the publishing sector faces a similar fate:

“Content may be free, but the format in which we buy it certainly is not. As Apple, Google, Red Hat, and others increasingly demonstrate, consumers and enterprises are happy to pay for “free” when packaged in convenient formats that add value to digital goods.
….
All of these (re)purchases strike me that the media world may have problems, but they are mostly of discovering convenient formats in which to deliver content. Formats that suggest, and sometimes demand, payment.”
….
Good content is a necessary precondition to getting paid, but it’s not going to be reason we pay anymore. That reason for payment is the format in which the content is delivered.
Perhaps it’s always been that way, but the physicality of the delivery mechanisms confused us: we were buying the paper but thought we were buying the news.”
Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10369471-16.html  Read more... (348 words, estimated 1:24 mins reading time)

Making a print-ready Acrobat 9 or similar PDF file can be tricky. Naturally, quality control or preflight should be a key part of any graphic design or publishing workflow. This said, here is a good initiative I came across while cruising the Graphicstart collection of RSS feeds:

Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat Updates Require New GWG Guidelines for PDF Creation from Office Applications

To make it easier and faster to get quality results in PDFs created from Office applications, the Ghent PDF Workgroup (GWG) has issued new best practice process guidelines. The new guidelines were developed in response to recent changes made to Office applications and the Adobe Acrobat family of products.

The new Office Printing PDF Creator Guidelines are available for free download at: http://gwg.org/Office_Document_Printing_-1.phtml

Says Menno Mooji, co-chairman of the GWG Office Document Printing Subcommittee and a founder of ISI Publishing Innovators, “With the software changes in Microsoft Office Service Pack 2 and Adobe Acrobat 9, new ways of creating predictable PDFs are now possible. As a result, we’ve released a document outlining best practices that cater to the new developments.
Source: http://www.quickprinting.com/web/online/Industry-News-and-Trends/Microsoft-Office-and-Adobe-Acrobat-Updates-Require-New-GWG-Guidelines-for-PDF-Creation-from-Office-Applications/1$10765  Read more... (217 words, estimated 52 secs reading time)