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FORUMS DIARY Day-to-day news and views from the Lab and from EP readers in 42 countries. INTERACTIVE VALUES What have you paid for new media lately? What are the cheapest--and what are the most expensive--interactive products and services? WRITING FOR INTERACTIVE MEDIA Writing for CD-ROMs and the web is different than writing for print. ARTICLES The Interactive Future of Signs "Why do billboards, bus cards, and store signs all have to carry the same static information all of the time? If you think about it long and hard, there’s no reason that the "pages" we see on signage shouldn’t be as animated and as interactive as the rest of new media..." Why the Internet is Bad for the Graphic Arts Business "...Hardware, software, digital design, electronic commerce, multimedia, publishing, entertainment, manufacturing, finance-- there’s no industry that isn’t being changed in some way by digital technologies. It’s not just the Internet, it’s the whole texture of the wired world making communications faster, easier, cheaper and more automatic. That can be very bad for the graphic arts business." A Bandwidth Perspective on Design "...All communications media development is leading us toward broader and broader publication bandwidths...The lowliest administrative assistants in the bowels of the hugest government bureaucracies now have high resolution laser printers on their desks...with typography that was the monopoly of graphic arts experts (like me) just a generation ago." In the Land of the Blind... "...There are too many blind visionaries talking too much trash to too many uninformed customers about too many things they don’t fully understand...Each new invention is touted as the killer application that makes all of human history up until this very moment obsolete..." The Human Cost of High Tech "...the great sickness that has come over American industry in the last five years is not simply a desire to make things better, it’s a fanatical zeal to “re- engineer” business so that it can get by without human beings, without continuity, without fun..." Ideas Drive Interactive Marketing "...New media--especially the web--closes the gap between creator and audience, between seller and buyer, moving communication 'from brain to mouse to screen,' the closest we can get (so far) to the ultimate communications link--'from brain to mouse to brain'...." Multimedia Databases "...Who needs everything on-line? What’s the real value of digitizing all of your text and graphics for instant retrieval at the touch of a button?...It occurs to me that, for most publishers, putting everything on line is more trouble than it’s worth..." Teaching Skills That Kids Can Use "... take a person from 1895 and put him in a 1995 office and he’d be utterly lost. Bring him to a modern supermarket or shopping mall and his head would start to spin. Put him in the middle of a high school classroom and he’d be completely at home ..." Continuous Publishing Replaces the Deadline "...writers, editors and art directors organize their work for the convenience of the pressman, batching up collections of copy and art with deadlines for the pouch that goes to the printer once a week...Interactive media eliminates the holy deadline..." New Media Is Cheap As Dirt "...Yes it’s also faster, it’s interactive, it’s customized and it’s searchable. But more than anything else, it’s cheap as dirt. It costs less than a buck to press a CD-ROM and just pennies to publish a page on the World Wide Web...." Participative Video: Virtual Reality Illustration "...Video is the opposite of interactive media. The pleasure of the new interactive texts is that they are participatory...every customer gets to drive through the content at his own pace...With video, all you can do is watch, the passive couch-potato recipient of somebody else’s fixed content..." Writing for the Web, Part I "...Everybody knows that writing a script for a TV commercial is different from writing an article for a magazine. So why should we think that text on the World Wide Web can just be "re-purposed" print material squirted out through an HTML word processor?..." Writing for the Web, Part II "...On the web, before you can compel your reader's attention you have to deal with his robot first. Robotic search programs like Lycos and Alta Vista constantly scan new pages on the web and build public directories of searchable key words. Personal search robots and algorithmic information agents do the same thing for companies and individuals..." On-Line All The Time, Everywhere "...Being wired means never having a minute to yourself, never being out of touch, never off-duty. The global telecommunications network links the whole world in real time at ridiculously low costs, abolishing distance, accelerating the pace of change, and bringing the world together in interesting new ways..." Developing Web Developers "...Sometimes things can be too cheap. On the World Wide Web, any maniac with a Macintosh and a modem can become a web developer....I don't know which pages are worse, the college sophomore's self-indulgent kaka or the corporate shovelware served up by MIS directors and PR flacks..." Tempting the Click "...interactive advertising is perfectly zappable and perfectly measurable. The interactive viewer doesn’t get a commercial unless he asks for it...and every time he views an ad, a computer knows..." Technopeasants and the Info Aristocracy "...The technopeasant is at the mercy of a growing Info Aristocracy of computer experts, media consultants, equipment vendors, software developers and ten-year-old kids who know how to surf the net. They are be-fogged by clich�s, terrified by the future and easily stampeded into bonehead technologies by sharpies and charlatans..." The Content Clich� "...In the first place, "purpose" is not a verb, and "re-purpose" is even less of a verb. More important, successful publishing is a lot more than just content, a lot more than merely words and pictures..." Where's the Money for Printers in New Media? "...In a tough graphic arts economy, prepress and printing firms are looking to escape increasing competition and narrowing margins by expanding into emerging interactive publishing technologies like multimedia, CD-ROMs, on-line services and demand printing..." Fenton on PREPRESS Graphic Arts Technical Foundation consultant Howie Fenton writes extensively about prepress and printing technologies.