I have now started another blog, comments allowed

http://commentrequest.blogspot.com/

So please go to item on Lawrence Wallis if you know where his adventures on the blogosphere may be found.

This new blog may have a wider scope. I have tended to start a new blog when in doubt so this one could be a way to integrate some ideas, even if only just as questions.

I have now visited Life Bytes , opposite the Odeon in Sidwell Street Exeter, for a full discussion on this Breeze as Acrobat situation. I am told that "it may not be a bad thing".

So ok, I am trying to get my head round it. Starting with my own experience that I don't find Flash content as 'engaging' as PDF or text. It is like being hit over the head with a Powerpoint presentation as designed sometime ago. There is no record of it, it cannot be edited or combined with other sources. I think Powerpoint has become much better or at least I have got used to it enough to copy out the bits I need.

Acrobat Connect may be improved on the current Breeze or maybe things will improve later. I would like an option to save the presentations as PDF and also to save the chat as PDF or text. These can be posted later apparently but the people in the audience have no option to do it for themselves. Maybe this is the attraction of Flash, that it is easier to keep control of content, but this is not the same as an engaging platform. Before the recent presentation of Acrobat 8, Adobe used to offer video plus PDF download. I found that much easier to follow or study later. The crazed load of Flash touring Acrobat 8 is impossible to follow if you want to get past the supposed benefits towards the actual features. What I want is a PDF file with a carefully structured set of bookmarks on the left.

I have not found any reference to improvements in PDF as a container for Flash, Quicktime or other media. Acrobat 7 is able to capture web pages with Flash, but it tends to come and go. You have to reload occasionally. I don't understand why and maybe this is not a problem for everyone but I notice PDF is rarely used for multimedia. Is it a technical limitation, or has Adobe just stopped explaining the option? At LifeBytes I was told there is another problem in controlling how Quicktime is displayed when designing a PDF from scratch. Apparently it pops out of the page and finds a new size. Maybe this is ok with a screen culture and some people I know are just hanging on to the idea of a page.

Meanwhile I am enjoying the video on Youtube so I don't mind Flash as such. The next couple of months could be a time for revision on PDF so far and maybe for looking at Breeze potential.

It is possible that Lawrence Wallis has joined in with the blogging scene. His words in Printweek are about the 'blook'. Surprisingly for me he makes no objection to the word 'blook' although he sometimes has a problem with variations on established language. His major complaint this week is about the standardised and restricted stock of most bookshops. Maybe he is finding that the web offers the variety and serendipity that browsing in bookshops offered in days gone by.

Mysteriously, he adds that "loyal readers ( rumour suggests one might exist ) may have noticed that I spent some time in the blogosphere to escape the bleak scene in bookselling". Well, sadly I can find no trace of this. Try the link, things may have been updated,

Please let me know if a link to a Lawrence Wallios blog turns up. Sorry, I can't find a way to turn on comments.

By the way, he is crestfallen that the Blooker Prize has been won by yet another cookery book. You know what? He has got a point.

I am still in shock after trying to take in the new information about Acrobat 8. The striking feature is that Acrobat is now based on Flash as well as PDF. What was Breeze is now Acrobat Connect, a conferencing system with a big advert button in the middle of the PDF oriented menu.

Kevin Lynch, previously with Macromedia, is Adobe vice president of product marketing for the Knowledge Worker Business Unit (KWBU) with responsibility for Acrobat and the Flash Media Server. He recently told Kurt Foss - "One of my visions at Macromedia has always been about the combination of asynchronous and synchronous communication. At Macromedia, with Breeze we were heavily involved with the synchronous real time—including the use of persistent meeting rooms. We also realized people want to get information that isn't always in real time. The document format from Acrobat is a perfect fit for that vision. Now we really have documents and people."

So the Breeze approach - a mix of chat, video and Powerpoint - is seen as closer to people than hard copy documents. Previously Adobe has not really promoted the PDF as slideshow option and the collaboration features have required really expensive server support. Acrobat Professional 7 did allow comments to be enabled in a PDF but effectively this was a secret. Flash now is the top priority for collaboration and it looks as if this will be promoted.

The presentation to the Acrobat Users did advertise a section on JDF but this did not happen. All the features are for knowledge workers - combining documents, exchanging comments, making sure text has been deleted (radaction), especially useful for the legal market.

What strikes me is that print is not really in there as a priority or even a mention in the background. More on this later after a look at a recent 'zeitgeist' article in Image Reports. This looks at how to compare Quark and InDesign, one of the big questions of the day. The picture that comes over of the approach to budgets and resources in pre-press or pre-media is a bit disturbing. Apparently many large users known to the editors of Image Reports are still using Xpress 4, introduced in 1998. Recent Mac operating systems may require new equipment. However "old Mac 9 Macs die eventually so even the most skinflint publishers are finally having to upgrade."

The article has a fairly relaxed acceptance of the current state of pre-press integration with data. "Xpress 7 introduces powerful XML/JDF based collaboration support though it is too early to see if real world users will actually take advantage of it." The option of using Job Jackets to ensure customers create PDF as required is explained but on InDesign there is no mention of the Acrobat features to initiate a JDF file.

Two problems. Pre-press is not rushing into new technology. Maybe if designers want to start up a JDF intent file they will form an orderly queue and make a joint request. Secondly Adobe are not going to promote the JDF aspects in Acrobat if they can better spend their time reaching knowledge workers directly. Maybe knowledge workers need print occasionally and would like to specify their requirements, but this has been allocated to a different marketing budget.

Although I am still in shock, the conclusion I'm reaching is that it is time again for people in print to have a close look at what Adobe is doing. The Breeze idea may not work. After the free trials it looks as if a hosted service could cost more than a cable movie subscription for each user. Google Groups is free. But it could be a sound idea to use video and speech as well as text and graphics.

In the same issue of Image Reports Gee Ranasinha writes about AJAX on the web, based on XML and other strange stuff. People wanting to communicate have many options so print may need to move a bit faster on JDF etc. to be part of the mix.

Which was the better record label, Motown or Atlantic?

Evidence from Printweek that a new view of print as part of something else is gaining strength. Lauretta Roberts writes in an editorial headlined "newspapers not on the extinction list just yet" that "publishers have to face up to the pesky internet issue." She recognises that online can add to print, with blogs, wikis, and "citizen journalism", ( her quote marks, standard for proper journalists like Emily Bell for example).

There is also a mention for the Google offer of a PDF of out of copyright books. This is seen as a possible challenge for publishers but a great opportunity for printers equipped for short print runs and specialised binding. The conclusion is that "for printers there's a new market opening up."

The London College of Printing became the London College of Communications so maybe "Communications" is a term to cover the expanded world of online and on-off editions. I am still thinking about the 'Knowledge Based Economy' and where print fits. KBE may not be the right term and it may not be that new. A one-off copy on request is back to scribe technology so maybe the KBE started then.

I am writing a blog from the IAS conference on the Knowledge Based Economy. It is at the learn9 blog.

The connection with print will show up more clearly later. Apparently the knowledge economy started long ago, way before the steam powered printing press. There was industrial espionage on navigation technology involving Portugal and Spain. So I was told over coffee. More detail later.

This report for instance on Trinity Mirror in Printweek has no mention of the Mirror website or how advertising income splits or trends. Haymarket have other marketing titles where such issues do crop up. Surely the print industry need to know a bit more about this?

There it is in a headline.

Young people turn off TV and discard newspapers to surf the net

In black and white, on the business page of a newspaper. I saw it there myself only this morning.

Also on the Guardian award winning website.

At this time a news organisation such as the Guardian is ready to face the facts. In my opinion the yound people are not alone. There are probably others using the web more and print less.

Previously analysis by Roy Greenslade has often skipped over this web trend as an explanation of declining print circulations. There is still not much detail ABCstyle on web and print numbers. Still, at least the business pages are now fairly clear as to what is happening.

I think the UK newspapers have definitely switched to an online policy. I have updated the UK Acrobat Services site with news on the Guardian free PDF offer and the FT recovery and web growth. In both cases there is a lack of info on a clear business model. The FT reports advertising growth but no info on what proportion was online. There is circulation info with the UK fully paid only a few thousand more than the web subscribers. So the FT is close to being a news organisation with an online base.

Richard Wray in The Guardian reports

"Pearson's chief executive, Marjorie Scardino, admitted yesterday that the ability of its flagship Financial Times title to take part in the growing online debate was being hampered by the subscription fees charged for access to its FT.com site.
But announcing better-than-expected first-half profits for Pearson, which includes Penguin books and educational publishing, Ms Scardino stopped short of suggesting that the paper's website, which is nearly 11 years old, should dump subscriptions altogether and rely on advertising revenues."

This is pushing the Guardian approach which seems to have more or less given up on subscriptions. There is very little promotion for the 'digital editions' and the new PDF free download is based on the web updates round 24 hours, not a copy of a previous print edition.

Unfortunately most of the potential benefits of PDF have got lost along the way. The new A4 G24 is designed to be printed out apparently. It can be read on screen but there are no links from the content page. The photos are sometimes fairly low res, maybe intended for web a bit smaller. The 'digital edition' has no navigation use of PDF as a document. It is not like a magazine where PDF has been used to offer the complete experience of print.

There may have been a chance that Guardian readers would have paid for a PDF with graphics. But this has not been promoted so the G24 may be the format that will continue. Lots of text but small photos and no illustration.

The FT subscription model has some benefits. It includes some PDF pages complete.

I had flu last week so am just catching up with things.

Printweek (6 July) had a news item about the Microsoft response to discussion with Adobe on PDF and XPS. Quite strange this as Jack Schofield for one commented on this news in the Guardian June 8th.

The reason for sudden interest could be a technical comment from Simon Eccles, based around the story. "XPS is designed to allow decent typography and real ICC-based colour management. Hooray. No more ghastly customer-supplied Word docs with bizarrecolour palettes and random line endings."

In brief, any way to get from desktop to plate with mimimum hassle is to be welcomed.

Stangely however, Simon Eccles concludes by stating that although service bureaus may start to receive XPS files in about six months time, "whether they'll be able to output them is another question."

Surely the print industry will see this one coming? When has pre-press held back just because the customers have yet to form an orderly queue and reach agreement amongst themselves on exactly what they are demanding?

Could it be as easy as 'place as XPS' on a menu somewhere? Is there a plug-in company looking at this?

The Simon Eccles article makes no mention of Global Graphics although they developed XPS for Microsoft. Presumably they have some ideas on how to connect with a RIP.

Whatever happens with Adobe and Microsoft, my impression is that for the bulk of documents coming out of Offices it should be more or less an open standard to store a pge edescription and get it printed. Adobe can't expect to sell full Acrobat to everyone just to create PDF. Sometime next year things may be a bit clearer.

Let us hope Printweek reports on a lot more detail. There could be some developments.

There has been a really helpful response on Adobe blogs from Mike Potter.

This is the best explanation I have found so far on how LiveCycle and FLEX compare in the Adobe scheme of things.

However, my conclusion is that LiveCycle is now intended for a very niche approach where document control is mandated or the look or print is a legal requirement. the energy is with FLEX. Comments from Jeff on the blog seem fair enough -

Jeff — 04:45 PM on July 10, 2006
I don't understand the need for pdf forms at all. To me, pdf is good, very good infact, for one thing, and one thing only, output.

It also appears that 'Apollo' is mostly about making offline work possible with Flash applications. It may not have much to do with developments in the PDF format.

So what is new with Acrobat 8 ? Time will tell.

I am still none the wiser about Flx or apollo as either appear in the Acrobat 8 story.

However I have found some helpful messages from the Flex end of the discussion.

Am I being a bit rude in suggesting that Adobe believes in segmented marketing and targeted messages? Maybe the confusion is just in my own head, but I can't help thinking that some guidance on Flex and LiveCycle would be helpful. If the LiveCycle prices are not adjusted soon there needs to be some good reason not to move along with Flash. OK you used to like paper based design.

Sorry, put that last sentence down to my current confusion. Of course there is a case for server based PDF software. One day Adobe will explain where this fits with Flex.

At Life Bytes (local web access point) on Friday I happened to see an example of an invoice generating webpage using PHP and FPDF. Fairly simple design but it worked really well. A4 PDF from a text file of data. At a time when the Flex SDK is free and I think one CPU is free as well something like that, anything to hold some attention for server PDF is worth promoting. Surprising really that the Adobe blogs don't promote FPDF.

Lawrence Wallis in today's Printweek is realistic about change and the headline even finds a welcome for changes in technology. It is suggested that moving upmarket to higher quality is only a short term remedy when new techniques become possible. Two examples are given. "Most seismic was the onset of desktop publishing (DTP) in 1985 that rocked and destabilised the prevailing pre-press establishment." There, that is enough direct quoting. You can't just copy stuff out of Printweek as if it was something from the blog of Roy Greenslade.

The second example given is colour repro on personal computers sometime later. Once described as "good enough" this is now apparently widely accepted.

There is still professional pre-press of course but at IPEX the term most widely used was "pre-media". There is still some video editing kit that is not available at Currys Digital.

But for DTP it is now possible to imagine that the technology available at home is good enough for most purposes. Amazon probaly stock most of what anyone would need.

Adobe have announced Flex 2 alongside an updated Flash. This is for 'rich internet applications' and links to XML data on the server. I don't understand when or why to prefer it to LiveCycle and PDF. I am getting more and more confused about Adobe. I have written a sort of report on Acrobat Services dotcom but it is pretty clear this is not based on any info about wher LiveCycle may be going.

Roy Greenslade has responded to my earlier post about his new blog. Briefly my request is that he should find some way to do an updated version of the circulation studies he used to do in the print version of the Guardian media pages.

For one thing he is fairly well placed to guess at what a business model might be like in the minds of people at the Guardian or Telegraph. Sometime later ABC will be allowed to publish some joined up figures.

Below is a complete cut and paste from his blog and my comment

-----

One final noteworthy comment came from ipex2002 who offered me a "big welcome as a blogger" and said I showed "much understanding for the blogosphere". Then he added:


"Unfortunately I find the blog is made up of too many short items. I was hoping for something like the analysis Roy Greenslade used to do of circulation figures for newspapers. The ABC numbers could be compared over the years and made some sense of where each newspaper was going."
I'm happy to say, ipex2002, that I plan to do just that in future. As soon as the monthly figures are released I'll run an analysis. Some might feel this to be a bit "old media", but print newspapers remain influential and, anyway, charting their sales decline is more than a nod to new media's growing importance. I've also been pushing for a coherent and authoritative monthly audit of newspapers' online hits and quantity of users. There's a lot going on on that front and the council of the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) is trying to work out a way of providing a regular chart.

--------

my comment


Roy,

Thanks for responding to the request in the IPEX2002 blog. What I would really like is some industry agreed business model that showed how a news organisation was doing in each context, print circulation and online stats. I realise this is asking a lot. If there is a business model nobody is too open on what it is. ABC seem to find it hard to get agreement on what to publish. The 'digital editions' were I thought ok to add to print circulation figures, but no newspaper seems to have done this.

Still, I think this is the way your blog is going and the fact that you now concentrate online says something about trends.

I don't read all of your blog, but Technorati seems effective enough to find mentions of IPEX2002...

Best

Will

Will Pollard (will787 on Guardian talk)

I suppose proper journalists report actual news as they have sources. In a blog it is ok to just ask a question and confess to ignorance.

What is supposed to be good about Acrobat 8.0 ? Apparently it will appear in the fourth quarter of this year. This is June, the summer drift has started, at least for me, but still as memory serves on the previous seven occasions there was some kind of rumor as to what to expect.

Having listened to a webcast of the recent briefings for financial analysts I can say that I have some idea of where Flash is going and what to expect from the next Creative Suite. But the only information on Acrobat 8.0 is that the upgrades will be a boost to income.

Just had a look at Google blogsearch and this seems to still be the main aspect.
According to Sundar Mudaliyar for PDF Converting, "Cowen and Company said investors worried over Adobe's disappointing guidance for the fourth quarter should take comfort in the launch of Adobe's new Acrobat 8.0 product, set for launch in November.

Analyst Walter Pritchard said the launch of Acrobat 8.0 in the fall could boost revenue by 29% sequentially."

The question is though "what are the features that will encourage the upgrade?", at least that seems a reasonable question at some point.

Sundar Mudaliyar has only limited information- "Acrobat 8.0 will offer users enhanced interactivity features to counter Microsoft's Vista operating system, which is slated for launch in early 2007 and could include PDF conversion tools."

OK, "enhanced interactivity", what can this mean? There is some information coming out from the Flash end of Adobe around 'Apollo' which seems to be a way to work offline with a web environment. Currently I find that Acrobat can capture web pages with Flash but the result can disappear when you save it. Maybe a future PDF will work better as a Flash container. Is that it?

Acrobat is now part of a 'knowledge worker' business unit that also works with Breeze. I find Breeze ok except that I miss having a record later as you do with a PDF set of slides. Maybe Acrobat 8 will include a Breeze plugin.

Whatever the guessing might be about Flash, has PDF development come to an end? This could be the real worry around the Microsoft issues. Creating PDF for static office documents and litho pages is pretty well sorted out and may not remain the sort of function that can be charged at a premium.

So information on what Acrobat 8 actually offers would be interesting.

Jeff Jarvis is well in touch with the UK at this time. He has a lot on the BBC and repeats some views on the Guardian. I have added a comment there.

Briefly, I find I am reaching a limit on accepting the way the Guardian is reporting the shift to online and participatory. Their own moves are ok but they seem to knock anything else. After a while it stops making much sense.

The Guardian and Observer are still confusing when it comes to blogs and the web. They seem to be moving that way but still raise questions about anything on the scene other than themselves.

Today Peter Preston suggests we should 'beware false prophets of the internet age', a reference to Sir Martin Sorrell. Preston shows how the structures of advertising agencies are challenged by the web just as much as print media. "We're all in this together." What is supposed to follow from this? The facts of the trends remain the same. Group M forecast that internet advertisement spend will overtake national press spend by the end of 2006.

The Group M figures are just about the UK. Preston also mentions Omynews with 21,000 'citizen reporters', quote marks as appearing in the Observer. First, a few correction on detail. There is an 'h' in OhmyNews. The founder is Oh Yeon-ho. There are currently about 41,000 citizen reporters for the Korean site and approaching 1000 for the English language site.

More disturbing is the continued use of quote marks around the term "citizen journalism". Why is it that professional print journalists have difficulty in using these words directly with the same meaning as on the OhmyNews site and other places? At least Emily Bell had been direct enough to state that she thinks the term is "horrible" but she has yet to explain why. Is it something about the UK, where we are all supposed to be subjects?

Is it because citizen journalism is seen as too close to blogging? The 'Comment is Free' approach seems to me to combine an attempt to take on the format of a blog while continuing to criticise most of the blogs that previously existed. Preston recently wrote that "Most Guardian journalists....are still in the throes of blogging adjustment. Don't pronounce from on high, or polish too hard. Get down there on the ground in the democracy pit, rubbing shoulders with the southern California wing of Blogosphere Inc. Be one of the boys, like one of your readers. Cultivate a folksy, conversational voice." This was in a comment claiming that search engines now determined a style of writing that can be easily understood and has destroyed the fine traditions of puns in headlines.

As one of many reasons for print journalists not to be too alarmed, Preston points out that "what works in Korea may not work anywhere else". There is no reporting on the English language version of OhmyNews though the number of citizen reporters is up from 300 at the time of the first conference last year. Next month the conference will include information on the new Japanese site. Maybe Preston will come back to this later.

To my mind the most significant recent news is not even mentioned, unless it was included last week and I missed it. The Guardian will offer a free PDF version of online news for readers to print out and carry about. It is assumed that such free offers will help the future audience for web sites. Maybe the Times has a similar idea in publishing print in the USA, where the growth is seen for London online titles.

Round about now, the net is closing in. The web is the main news medium. Print is peripheral. It is all over for the Sunday newspapers.

And finally, Preston takes a very cheap shot at John Simpson just because Simpson links UK tabloids with "false stories" and "interferance in people's private lives". Researching Simpson's autobiography Preston finds dialogue between Simpson's parents from the time that Simpson was little more than a year old. Preston raises the question of how there can have been a shorthand note.

In the comment about search engines, Preston has a few positive things to say about blogging as the scene is not threatening to some traditions of journalism. "I started in journalism because of Thomas Nash and the pamphleteers of London's coffee houses more than 400 years back - because, with no press, let alone a Commentisfree one, society functioned by superlative samizdat and the semi-private phrasemaker was king."

Was he there at the time? Can he show us the notebook?

Lawrence Wallis writes in Printweek that memory is a variable so far as relying on it is concerned. Looking through the Printweek list of 100 movers and shakers I was surprised not to find Martin Bailey, even on the list of those who had slipped away. Then I searched this blog to find he was missing last year. What can this mean? Has JDF become so well established there is no influence to be recognised in going on about it? Maybe Global Graphics is now concentrating on work for Microsoft so are not seen as part of the print industry. This fate has overtaken anyone from Adobe. They go on so much about mobile video that nobody notices anything to do with Postscript.

I may be a bit unfair about the Guardian but then again I genuinely find it hard to understand what they are going on about. I still think there are some muddled messages somewhere.

Today the Reader's Editor, that is the representative for people like you and me, has been lucky enough to get a direct quote from the actual editor on the occasion of the decision not to hold back news from the web just because there is still a print deadline to come.

"I love the paper. I continue to believe in it."

Yeah, right. This is like Jeff Jarvis writing "I have nothing against books".

Such statements are a starting point for something else.

Meanwhile just to show how contrary people can be I am somewaht miffed at a book of coupons sent to me by a kind friend who visited London. The coupons entitle me to reductions on the Guardian and Observer during the world cup. I don't get out much but I think this offer has not turned up in Exeter. In today's media section there is a report that the Manchester Evening News is charged for in the suburbs but now given away in the centre where a new readership is assumed to exist. Maybe the Guardian coupons are intended for people in the south east, assumed to be young and impressionable while the paper version is subsidised by payments from people in the south west and other regions, assumed to be old and slow to change their ways. Anyway, the free web site anywhere is still welcome.

The coupons are accepted in Exeter, by the way.