Printing talk at the Web 2.0 Summit

Another Web 2.0 event is going on this week, sponsored by O'Reilly Media, fitting in that the company's founder, Tim O'Reilly, is credited with defining the term Web 2.0.

In our business, HP (NYSE HPQ) has been the leader in applying printing ideas to this arena (dubbing their broad initiative with the handle "Print 2.0"). They have their executives at the conference this week, taking their story from HP-sponsored, print-industry events (see my recaps of their end-of-May and end-of-August events) to the bigger, broader world.

This bigger picture approach is critical in communicating HP's vision of printing from the Web (as is the acceptance that the message may need to be reinforced again and again). As I personally found out more than a dozen years ago, while working on this idea in its embryonic stages, most of the Internet's concepts and designs center around the display aspect of the human interface, but when it comes to real users, hard copy "takeaway" is also part of the solution. In the simplest sense, this might be printing driving directions from a mapping site. On the other end of the continuum, an example is the preservation and ability to display or pass along the artwork passionately created (see example image above) on a Facebook wall via Graffiti, one of HP's recent printing partnerships.

Further info on all the partnerships (Disney, Flickr, Graffiti and Microsoft Live Spaces) can be found in HP's release and elsewhere in the news. A good read, too, is the blog entry from one of O'Reilly's own, Sarah Milstein, at the O'Reilly Radar blog with "Better Printing from the Web (Way Better)". I had the chance to chat briefly with HP exec (via Tabblo) Antonio Rodriguez following the seminar covered by Milstein, and he was very enthusiastic about his presentation and the response to it. Continuing to go beyond the printing industry is exactly the kind of pioneering that HP needs to keep doing to make their story really go somewhere!