I’m working on a new web project - you’ll hopefully be reading about it here soon - that required a new domain name. While I was at it I got Lornitropia.com, and even thought of a few others.

I’ve often heard that it’s very hard to work out and be depressed at the same time, and I think the same is true for woodworking, and shopping for domain names. There’s just something about buying a new URL that’s filled with hope and potential, along with the casino-gambling style rush you get when you type the name into the little box, and hit “Go” and wait to see if you can have it.

I think I’d better say goodbye to GoDaddy.com soon or this will start to get expensive!

A while back I wrote about how the graphics industry needed to lead the way in the web 2.0 revolution, and the “new web�?. Frankly, I didn’t expect many folks in my industry to read it, or even to find it in the first place. If print is a Hatfield, the Internet is a McCoy, and I might as well have posted it on the backside of a billboard. Oh me of little faith ;-)

Change is in the air

It’s slowly changing, however. Dr. Joe Webb wrote on the subject recently, and Joel Friedman is also starting a news site on print. Both of them have RSS feeds.

Still there is much to do. We are in a communications industry, graphics communications, and we need to demonstrate leadership in communication. The older folks will be rolling their eyes about now, but what they really need to understand is that the print industry is being repopulated by those who get it. Increasingly, the people we all market to will not see the Internet as a mortal enemy, but as a useful tool for conducting business.

Social networking online is going to be ubiquitous

Social networking online is going to be ubiquitous in a few years. I expect that the days of looking up contacts just by name or company name are numbered. So-called virtual relationships will become more and more common as people discover the benefits of online networking. At Print ’05 I made contact with several people I knew from online but had never met in person. We can all expect more of that. Tools like OpenBC and Linkedin will become as common as Outlook.

That’s why I’ve begun a campaign to encourage our colleagues in the graphics industry to join Linkedin. Linkedin is the strongest business-oriented networking site. Linkedin’s membership used to be slanted entirely toward the Bay area but it is becoming more diverse. It has also grown to be large enough that it’s genuinely useful for everyone.

Now is the time to join in

Now is the time for us to demonstrate our technological leadership. Folks generally join Linkedin through an invitation. If you are in the graphics industry, send an email letting me know who you are to linktosteve@gmail.com and I’ll send you an invitation.

Take a look at this post on Naked Conversations. It describes a story where a blogger working for IBM raised the ire of a school, an IBM customer, who then threatened IBM with a “student protest” where students would “burn their Thinkpads” if IBM didn’t fire the blogger. The blogger quit, in an effort to avoid embarrassing IBM. There’s more here.

IBM is a doormat because what student is going to burn a perfectly good laptop, just because their school told them to do it? They’re also a doormat for letting the blogger quit. I’d hate to be the salesman negotiating the next contract with that school…

The blogger is a doormat because IBM, dominator of many markets, inventor of many great things, who very nearly missed the PC revolution because of their own lard-inertia has suffered and dealt with embarrassment on a scale that dwarfs students burning laptops.

The school isn’t a doormat. They’re just stupid. Rather than refute the claims the blogger originally made, they attack the guy’s boss? This expresses not only glaring guilt, but fear bordering on panic.

Of the three parties, I think the blogger has obviously been the most honorable, but perhaps to a fault. What the blogger wrote was even handed, sourced, and professionally written - this was not a hate piece. If bloggers want to be treated as genuine journalists, then they have act as journalists would - and that means not backing down from the story, even when it gets a little messy, even for IBM. However, I am by no means an expert in the local culture involved.

IBM acted as one would expect any large, blunt, bureaucratic organization to act, only without the intelligence and panache. They lost a good person to avoid a petty conflict. Par for the course.

The school acted as one would expect a barely-legal fly-by-night degree mill to act, only without the credibility.