I’m at Print Outlook 2008 in New York City, and I noticed during Andrew Paparozzi’s presentation on commercial printing in 2008, based on survey results, that there were several themes revolving around competition. Print is more competitive than ever, and he stressed differentiation and not doing things just because competitors were doing them.

Will this drive an increased interest in competitive intelligence in printing? My experience is that this is one industry where CI hasn’t really taken hold, at least not in the same way as in medical/pharma and other industries. Perhaps as print gets more competitive and more dependent on innovation and positioning we will see a growing demand for CI in print.

You know you’re out of touch when a friend sends a link to a YouTube video, which you forward to friends in the press only to find they’d covered it a week earlier. That happened to me a few weeks ago when I forwarded the now-famous-among-printers Pazazz Printing video to Adam Dewitz at PrintCEOBlog only to have him reply that they’d covered it more than a week earlier, and just what rock had I been hiding under?

What can I say? I have kids. I just moved. Work’s been busier than usual…and I’ve been out of touch. Ouch!

Anyway, Dr. Joe Webb wrote a short bit about it last Monday,(paid subscription required) that was generally not too flattering.

Lighten up Joe. It’s a YouTube video. It’s “New Social Interactive Media 2.5″. It’s all a grand experiment, and while the language and attendant bleeping was a bit tiring it was very refreshing to me to see a) folks excited about printing enough to make any video, or even a book with that kind of message, b) printing folks internet savvy enough to make the video and see any benefit to doing to, and c) a printing company president gusty enough to do it.

My parent company’s web site, qg.com, has an Alexa rank of ~622,000. Lower is better - Google’s rank is 2. My best-friend’s wife’s site, www.breakfast-and-brunch-recipes.com has an Alexa rank of ~250,000, just lower than whattheythink.com’s 270,000. QuadTech’s site (10 million), as well as that of it’s competitors (qipc.com = 8 million, gmicolor.com not ranked) are generally in the millions along with this blog (2.3 million).

The web doesn’t seem to be very strongly embraced by the “ink-drinkers” in general. I think things are changing, and it will be some day. In the mean time, I say applaud those with the gumption to give it a try who can show the rest it’s not fatal.

There was a recent announcement that a UK printer is taking delivery of the first “Carbon Balanced” printing press, manfucatured by KBA. This isn’t very surprising because there is a lot of talk about carbon footprint, carbon offsets, and carbon everything else as people become more concerned with climate change and the socio-economic force it has as a political item.

It’s very surprising because printers are pretty pragmatic people, who aren’t usually given to spending money without a pretty darned clear understanding of the return on their invesment. While it’s easy to sell the idea of carbon balancing on the basis of principle, I expected the actual pricing to be a lot harder. I’m not surprised that a UK printer cares about climate change, I’m surprised he was willing to pay for the carbon balancing. Although the article doesn’t say what amount was paid for the carbon balancing, or even what it consists of.

As the political forces generated by threatening climate change drive people to value carbon footprints we will see a new currency emerge - carbon. the problem I see with this is that we’re not actually measuring the amount of carbon involved, instead the whole thing is based on calculations of how much carbon is believed to be emitted. These calculations are not always very simple. In calculating the carbon footprint of the beer I just drank, do I include the can? It’s recyclable, but what if I don’t recycle it? How about the salty popcorn that drove me to want the beer in the first place? Should its carbon footprint include the carbon from the beer that was clearly an inevitable result? Will the International Association of Carbon-Emiting Corporations come to the same quantity of carbon emitted for a given product as Americans Scared Shitless Of Climate Change, or the International Coalition of Carbon Trading Companies? Who decides what the right amount is?

An ounce of gold is an ounce of gold, and an ounce is clearly understood. That’s what enables the gold market to function.

Is a ton of emitted carbon as clearly understood? I don’t think so. So how is this market going to function?

I think initially the politcal value of balancing carbon footprints will be high enough, and the pricing of the balancing low enough, that it won’t be enough money to cause serious problems. The question is if carbon footprints will stay hot enough (pun intended) long enough for their value to get high enough to fight over. Eventually you and I are likely to pay extra for every product purely for carbon offsets. Before we get to that point, I think we’d better understand how this new currency will be established.