Joining the social club - Print 21 magazine article

The phenomenon of social computing and Web 2.0 is changing the way in which people interact. Can it also influence how people use print? Eliot Harper thinks so and points to example of companies that are already taking advantage of the new social order.

We are all social creatures. We can't help it. We were born to be social - even from birth we interact with one another and grow to develop abilities ranging from expression and gesture through to spoken and written language.

Over the past 25 years, computers have enabled us to extend our social platform from early bulletin board systems (BBS) and newsgroups in the 1980's, through to blogs, wikis, social network sites and the numerous online communities that exist today. This type of virtual social interaction is broadly referred to as 'social computing'.

Forrester Research has recently completed a research study in Social Technographics, looking at the different social media audiences engaged in today's web. They surveyed 4,500 youths to better understand consumer approaches to technology and various levels of social media involvement. Their research found that over 60 percent of young consumers use social networking sites at least once a week and around 40 percent check their social networks every day.

Adults are also authoring and consuming social media. Forrester reports that 22 percent of adults read blogs at least monthly and 19 percent of adults surveyed are members of a social media site. Customer ratings and review sites were the most popular online activity, with about 40 percent of survey participants utilising sites such as Amazon to read the thoughts and opinions of peers before making a purchase.

This new social media is expanding rapidly. Technorati reports that over 98 million blogs exist today and more than 175,000 new blogs are created every day. Flickr, a popular photo-sharing community, has an online repository that is quickly approaching 1 billion images (as of August 2007). We are seeing a similar growth trend across networking sites, virtual worlds and other online social communities.

Social computing is certainly not a new concept, but an evolutionary one. The social communities and supporting technologies of today have emerged to create a new form of social behaviour. This latest evolution is branded as 'Web 2.0'.

That's the idea
The term 'Web 2.0' was originally coined by O'Rielly Media in 2003 during a brainstorming session with MediaLive International. The term is used to describe the perceived evolution of the internet in areas where there is a migration away from using the web as an information silo to a computing platform with its own supporting technology layers.

Although the term 'Web 2.0' has become widely adopted, there is much disagreement about what the term actually means. Web 2.0 is a concept, not a technology, and like most concepts it does not have a fixed boundary but an evolutionary one.

As 'Web 2.0' is not a standard, an individual website cannot claim 'Web 2.0 compliance'. Moreover, Web 2.0 gravitates around web-based communities and hosted services that nurture social computing environments. Examples of such communities and services include personal blogs, podcasting, Flickr (a photo-sharing community), Wikipedia (a trust-based knowledge site), del.icio.us (a social bookmarking community), to mention just a few.

Underneath Web 2.0 communities and services lies a common technology platform that is core to Web 2.0. This platform includes a host of differing but complementary technologies that use common development techniques, protocols and standards, to deliver rich-internet applications to end users.

What about Print 2.0?
This Web 2.0 culture may be booming, but what does this mean for print? Has print become irrelevant in this online social community age? Well, a few innovative printing companies are already demonstrating that print can complement and add-value to online social communities. These printers are using digital printing equipment together with web-based ordering systems to offer printed products created from social content.

Web-based ordering for print is hardly a new concept - off-the-shelf web-to-print products have been available for several years. However, current web-to-print solutions largely focus on B2B markets, whereas these new innovators are almost exclusively targeting Web 2.0 social consumers.

These new breed of printers are leveraging Web 2.0 as a business platform to engage with consumers and add-value to providers in this space. While Web 2.0 enables users to capture, edit and share their personal lives on the internet, their virtual identity is stored online. Print enables users to share their digital content when they are offline and have something tangible that expresses their identity.

Through building a layer of integration into photo-sharing sites, virtual worlds, weblog publishing systems and other social computing platforms, these new printers are transforming print from a product into a new, 'social printing' medium. Key players in social printing include MOO, QOOP and Blurb. Let's take a look at what these companies do and how they do it.

MOO
MOO (www.moo.com) is an on-demand printing company based in London and is tipped to be one of the most successful hybrid businesses emerging from the UK. MOO has integrated with social networking site Bebo, photo sharing websites Flickr and Fotolog, virtual worlds Second Life and Habbo along with different weblog publishing services. Through MOO's integration into these social communities, they are able to offer an expanding portfolio of related products to users, including calling cards, note cards and sticker books.

MOO's product roadmap is guided by their customers. Take their first product, MiniCards, for example. MOO originally thought they would be used as calling cards, but MOO users quickly came up with many other uses for them, including gift tags, trading cards, mini-portfolios and even jewellery. MOO's customers give them the best ideas for new products and applications - they like to see what people are interested in doing and then bring a unique approach to commercialising customer ideas.

Although MOO are based in London that hasn't stopped them from having global customers. Royal Mail has direct service routes to five major cities in the US and with MOO's headquarters next to the largest Royal Mail post office in London, a print order can be on the next flight to the US and arrive the same day.

Blurb
Blurb (www.blurb.com) is a Californian-based self-publishing company that offers a range of published products including 'Blog Books' that integrate with leading weblog publishing systems including Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad and WordPress. Blurb works by "slurping" blogs to import text, images, comments and links into document templates. Within a few minutes, bloggers can order their virtual content as a full-colour printed hardcover book with a jacket.

In addition to blog slurping, Blurb also allows users to slurp content from Flickr and iPhoto to publish images in other book formats, such as recipes, vacation and wedding photos.

Blurb's publishing success is spreading fast through word of mouth and it is currently growing at 40 percent week-over-week in terms of units and revenue. This new self-publishing opportunity does not stop at blogs either; Web 2.0 enables Blurb and similar businesses to grow into different markets such as education where articles from wikis and other community websites can be compiled and printed as textbooks.

QOOP
QOOP (www.qoop.com), another Californian-based printing company, has partnered with a number of different hosted service providers including social networking site Facebook, photo sharing sites Flickr and Photagious and many others. QOOP offers one of the largest gamuts of printed products including photobooks, minibooks, posters, calendars, mugs and more - you name it, they print on it.

QOOP have a slightly different business model to other social printing companies, as they partner and integrate with over 30 different web communities which they use to promote and sell their printed products. These partner channels include photo networking sites The Black Stripe and Flukiest, social networking sites Facebook and Multiply, ancestry community 'ancestry.com' and many other communities.

Similar to Blurb's offering, QOOP has recently launched blogprinting.com, a blog printing service that integrates with leading weblog publishing systems including MovableType, WordPress, Typepad and Blogger for self-publishing of personal blogs.

Watch this space
While this new social printing phenomenon is still in its infancy, several innovative printing companies have already demonstrated that Web 2.0 has created a new business opportunity for print. Furthermore, these printers have proven that print can effectively complement the internet, rather than compete with it.

A few years ago, no-one would have thought that people would be expressing their online virtual identities in little printed calling cards or publishing their online diaries as casebound books. What next? Will we be publishing photo albums of neighbouring planets from our last virtual holiday in Second Life? Let's hope not.