I am trying something new (for me): hosting other writers I believe have something to say and that you might want to meet. Today it’s Antonio Rodriguez. I first met Antonio when he was the CEO (and founder) of Tabblo.com. Now Tabblo is part of HP and the Print 2.0 strategy. Antonio is a proven web entrepreneur who understands publishing really well. That makes a fascinating combination. You can discover more about Antonio on The Onda.

In the piece below, Antonio is asking a really good question: what should a print 2.0 platform look like. We have learned from Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and others what a successful web advertisement platform should look like, but we are very early in the process of inventing the print 2.0 platform. There is as much business in print as in advertisement.

Here it is:

My impressions of Print 2.0 in the age of the Unwitting Blogger (invited blog by Antonio Rodriguez)

There are a variety of threads floating around our new Print 2.0 strategy that are worth thinking about in the age of the unwitting blogger. I first wrote about this back at the beginning of Tabblo, arguing that regular people were becoming authors of content online without even knowing they were— in some cases doing the kinds of things that bloggers were, steadily producing content for small but interested audiences. And if anything, since then the explosion of social networking sites like Facebook, and microblogging apps like Twitter have but accelerated this process.

The line between communication and publishing continues to blur for the simple reason that the tools for creating, distributing, and consuming content have become so cheap and ubiquitous. Combined with the almost insatiable appetite we have to connect with each other, and the way in which Internet time accelerates these types of trends, we're really seeing the beginning of some incredible stuff (if you want to see just how far the Internet has brought us along this spectrum of communications/publishing, check out these two presentations).

The last time we had such a revolution in publishing, the "Desktop Publishing" revolution, the group that I now work for, IPG (Imaging and Printing), rode a wave that combined the PC with cheap printing to enable a whole new group of people publish content in a way that looked as good as was as well-finished as that of professional publishers. These folks put out content that was as varied as restaurant menus and poetry books and billions of dollars of industry value were created. Ten years later, millions of people felt empowered to "author content," even if this meant sending Christmas letters that looked like ransom notes from all of the different typefaces used.

But that was a more deliberate process for two key reasons: first, the devices for generating the output cost money (even if the prices have dropped like a rock over the last two decades). Second, the physical nature of the distribution of the content was limited to moving atoms around from printer to consumer. Today, the Internet obviates the need for the publisher to worry about the mechanics of distribution even when the final product is meant to be consumed on paper. In fact thanks to the huge success that HP (and others) experienced during the PC/Desktop boom, there are now more than 400M deployed personal fabricators (printers) ready to turn all of those bits right back to atoms right in people's homes.

So when Patrick writes about Cloudprint, or about the importance of web applications, it is not just because they are cool technologies. It is because each of them enables today's casual publisher to take yet another step into creating and moving content in a digital world. Cloudprint to me is Twitter for documents and printers (leveraging a lot of the same casual publisher characteristics), and the eventual rise of webapps as content authoring environments is much less about the death of the desktop app than it is about portable interfaces for dealing with specific types of experiences around publishing that can be collaborative while living very close to the communities that benefit the most from them.

The trick that all of us involved in the Print 2.0 implementation are trying to figure out is how to inject key pieces of functionality into the content creation, selection, distribution, and consumption process that help to accelerate the process by which we make everyone into an unwitting blogger. We've all got stories to tell across a range of mediums and to audiences of all sizes, and as IPG has learned, opening up these possibilities are the way that billion dollar industries are made.