Tuesday, March 21, 2006

I am concentrating on IPEX at the moment. It could be an occasion when the print industry is definitely seen as part of a communications industry based on the web. My blog is still called IPEX 2002 but there is not much point in changing this.

I may seem to be going backwards. The new Acrobatusers website has more or less ignored print and pre-press in favour of 'knowledge work', more or less Acrobat for the desktop. I still think hard copy is part of the discussion. For one thing going back to publishing assumptions is useful even to think about online.

Also I am beginning to see PDF as only one option. It is possible to move in and out anyway. The PDF project has been to move documents from paper to web. this now can take many forms.

I have continued to move studies around quality and learning into journalism. There is a story at OhmyNews around 'comment is free', the new website from the Guardian. I think "citizen journalism" is going somewhere, and there is a related discussion about knowledge authority that will reach academic journals at some point.

This is an example of how the print context is relevant for a web discussion. I have tried to follow a story in Acrobat Services UK site about the ABC circulation certificates that could include 'digital editions'. So far no UK newspapers have 'opted in'. My current guess is that sites like 'comment is free' will allow print journalists to get more used to the web and some writing about news oprganisations in print and online will follow. Circulation figures and a business model will follow that.

Today the Guardian reports that the BBC is about to take on "web 2.0". This is confusing. Recently someone at Life Bytes said that "web 2.0" could mean anything. this turns out to be true. The BBC seems to think that "web 2.0" means working with Microsoft and Sony. Surely they are not into open source at all? Sony keep coming up with strange formats for storage.

So I think "web 2.0" could be a suitable topic for the conference on the 'Knowledge Economy' coming up in Lancaster. One debate seems to be about realism and linguistics. As in there really is a 'knowledge economy' or the words are used for some other reason ( a neo-liberal plot to restrict academic freedom for example ). When OhmyNews refers to Web 2.0 as part of their press release on working with Softbank on a site for Japan and expanding into TV, I regard this as realistic. They mean to do more or less what they announce. But "web 2.0" could also be rhetoric, and there seems to be some variety in how this used.

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