This is how I feel, along with many of the attendees here in New York, on day 2 of HP’s “What do You have to say?” campaign launch. My fellow HP blogger Eric Kintz wrote an excellent summary of the event: HP Ignites the Print 2.0 Revolution . A lot of facts, links to the launch sites and videos can also be found on the press release.

Printing is exciting again because… it’s not about print! Instead, it’s about what each of us has to say. The combination of digital content, the web and digital print is remarkably powerful. I like the way John Batelle in the panel session spoke about the “conversation economy”. John described the 3 bumps of IT:

- bump 1: digitized the back office. The interface was the command line: C:\
- bump 2: digitized the front office. A PC on everyone desk, Windows and GUI were the new interface
- bump 3: today. Every interaction with customers is digital. Search is how we ask questions of technology now. Search is the beginning of a new interface. It is the transition from packaged good to a conversation economy. Everyone is in the media business now and that media is conversation.

This is how I see the role of print: it is a powerful tool for this conversation. I saw many examples in the last 2 days. I’ll highlight one that I think demonstrates the power of including the physical output of print in this digital conversation: Letters From Katrina by Mark Hoog, a United Airlines pilot and executive director of the Children's Leadership Institute. This book is a set of letters from children in Colorado and California to children of the Gulf Coast touched by the Katrina tragedy. This is user generated content that touches your heart, and it is not YouTube. Self publishing and the capability to digitally produce (through Lightning Source) made this book a reality. It is available on Amazon. 100% of the proceeds from the sale of this book is placed in an endowment that will create a lifetime of scholarships and opportunity for children throughout Mississippi and the Gulf Coast.

Customers are now in control in this conversation economy. In this spirit, as part of the marketing campaign, HP is offering experiences inspired by personalities, in the form of web sites where customers can mash their content with professional content from these personalities. Gwen Stefani ‘s experience is going beyond the web site. In New York, you can watch the Reuters sign in Times Square ands start interacting with it, using your mobile phone. You create your personalized doll, with 60 seconds to do it. Once done, a text message will lead you to the web site, from which you can print (once you get home) the paper doll you just designed. I saw people playing with this sign yesterday night. They seemed to have a great time, took pictures, it was very cool.

It’s also symbolic of a trend. I had written in a previous post on the increasing role of the mobile phone as our interface to digital content and print. At the time I wrote about a simple print service from the cloud. John Markoff wrote this NYT article on Cloudprint that you might enjoy. Melissa Perenson in her blog also gave her perspective on this experimental service.

In the conversation economy, print is increasingly “un-hooked”!