Why print will never die by a digital evangelist

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Why print with never die by a digital evangelist. And the reason is that, as of today, it is just too difficult to manage your data.  Two things have recently co-joined to make me think this.

 

Over the summer I purchased the Epson 650 scanner (awesome bit of kit) so that my daughters could scan old photo’s so that they could load images up to Facebook.  They got very board very quickly and I am left with about 5,000 pictures to do and I have become very selective about what I am now scanning. They also discovered that it is quicker to take a picture on their iphone of the desired picture and side load it.  Who says that they don’t get IT.

 

Over the weekend, whilst in the attic, I found my old Samsung Super 8mm camcorder.  After a quick clean of the battery terminals (note to self, again, don’t store anything with batteries) the machine pinged into life and we (family plus grandparents) spend Sunday laughing like man people at the poor camera work, our fabulous sense of fashion and dancing techniques.  My daughters are not so keen to load this content to YouTube for some reason and it will remain restricted to private viewings.

 

However these two media experiences have made me realise just how hard it is to digitise content to keep it and in what format.  Without the camera I had no playback, without the physical images (pictures) my kids would not have know the pictures were there.

 

I have written extensively about the “six screens of life” (the lit screens where we create and consume) and indeed the 7th screen (the dark one which is where content is until we view it.) Obvious but it should be said but our physical world is the same as digital, it is dark until we view it, but the ease of accessing already printed material makes it a winner today for some content.

So I have a content problem matrix

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Print wins out in a number of ways for material already printed, but will “immediate on” help digital win for digitised content?  

  • Discovery.  Discover is still a black art in both digital and physical worlds as it requires you to stumble across it, however physical has a element of recall about its form. Photo frames, screen savers will always compete with book shelves.  However video/ movie content is as difficult in analogue and digital worlds as it depends on technology
  • Archive.  Defiantly my issue.  Getting the content into a suitable format and which format for long term storage and ensuring it can be found and put on a lit screen.

 

Therefore my view, as of today is that print with never die as it is just currently too difficult to manage my print data, but video/movie is a problem whatever.  However itunes has shown that I can swap from my LP’s to digital using thumbnails, maybe that is what I need for my videos, but not one thumb nail but 9 (nine) per image so a get a sense of the content/ context which is not always captured in the first screen.  Tagging and naming for video needs to be made easier.