In the spirit of self-publishing, Russell Davies et aliud created Newspaper Club, a mostly UK launched collective dedicated to building a service to help people make their own newspapers. One of my favorite ideas is Things Our Friends Have Shot On Flickr which is a beautiful example of the digital world colliding with print media.
It’s very reminiscent of James Bridle’s Tweetbook which, itself, is a prime example of hacking current technologies to get what doesn’t, but should exist:
I wanted to test Lulu’s capacity for hardback books, to continue experimenting with the literary cornucopia machine, and to see if you could make a traditional diary/journal in retrospect. And you can, and it’s quite nice (apart from some weird kerning issues). No, most of it doesn’t mean anything, certainly not to anyone else, but it makes physical a very real time and effort.
It was cobbled together with InDesign, but required a custom code to scrape the twitter API which is trickier than it sounds since you can only make 100 API calls an hour and are limited to downloading 2000 tweets per hour.
The take away, I suppose, is that digital culture is finding new ways to couch its content and, further, that paper is still a legitimate medium. Best of all, there is an inversion to the book/newspaper/scroll metaphor emerging on the web and it’s causing designers to rethink the traditional print media layouts:
