Convergence - Written by Robert Ivan on Sunday, April 19, 2009 2:40 - 6 Comments

Metaprinter Tries Out Printcasting

Tags: Advertising, Blogging, Convergence, DigitalPrinting, FeedJournal, Innovation, KnightNews, Printcasting, Printing

What is Printcasting? From their site:

Printcasting is a first of its kind online tool that assists users in dynamically creating customized newspapers and magazines comprised of information gathered from local news sources such as blogs, newsletters, news organizations, user content, and other Contributors. Creating your own publication is as simple as adding the elements you want included in your publication through the easy to use Printcasting.com interface. Without having to hire a team of editors, graphic artists, or authors you will be able to create your own, professional publication for distribution.

Publishers will also be able to allow Advertisers to place targeted advertisements in their publications and, in the future, receive a portion of revenue generated from those advertisements. Publications created by the user may then be available for print, download, and distribution to Subscribers.

I wrote about the years-ago-created RSS to print application FeedJournal and it’s potential for a digital newspaper application last year, so Printcasting’s claim to be the “first of its kind” in this realm isn’t necessarily true, what is unique though is their attempt to monetize the resulting product with a simple ad creation tool (among other things).

Printcasting is a Knight News Challenge winner and their website is inviting so I decided to give it a try for Metaprinter. I want to emphasize that the Printcasting site was in open Beta / preview mode when I did this so don’t judge too harshly.

Step 1. Definitely watch this instructional video before doing anything.

Printcast Your Blog from Dan Pacheco on Vimeo.

Step 2. Publish your blog and tweak the layout.

I had a problem with this part in that I wanted to use my Metaprinter logo in the header. No problem with the upload but the Printcasting interface commands the blog Title and Tagline on, there’s no way to remove them from the header. I got around this by resizing my header logo smaller and turning the text to white. If you look closely though you can see the white type cutting into the bottom of the words “news media” in the screen capture below. Not a huge deal but maybe in the future they will allow publishers to turn off the text in these locations. Here’s a closeup of how the header looked before I tweaked it.

Step 3. Done!

When you are completely done a screen pops up giving you the option to email up to 100 people a link to your new Printcast and also gives you the embed codes for several different widgets like the one below.

A magazine built by Printcasting!
Metaprinter

How does the completed product look? Pretty good except I didn’t expect the PDF to cut off my articles (I’m not that wordy am I?). When they reach a certain word count (I guess), an automatically created tinyurl is placed at the end of the offending article and redirects the reader to the Printcasting site to complete reading the article. Also all my hyperlinks in my articles are dropped which I can understand if the product is destined for print, but they’re dropped everywhere, the pdf version, the magazine view, and the quick read view. Hyperlinks are a huge part of blogging, sometimes being unable to link out makes an article less usefull to the point of uselessness. Here’s the PDF if you want to see how it turned out.

Step 4. Advertising

Just for kicks I started putting together an advertisement to see how easy it was and I am happy to report that the experience is pretty straightforward and intuitive.

What did I like?

The entire process was straightforward and intuitive.
I like the idea of being able to offer my readers a print version of my blog.
Creating an advertisement was easy.
I might be able to sell advertising on my printcast.

What didn’t I like?

Not being able to turn off the Title and Tagline text in the header.
My hyperlinks disappearing everywhere.
My blog posts being cut off despite using only 5 pages in my pdf.
Not being able to read the small text in “magazine view” despite zooming in and viewing on a 24″ monitor.
Not knowing what ads will appear in my printcast.

What I’m not sure about.

#25 in the Terms of Use says Printcasting is for California Use Only. um… can you explain this layman terms? What am I, as an out of stater, opening my self up to here?
Specifically, how is advertising revenue shared?
How can I sell ad space on my printcast?

I hope to get someone from Printcasting or Bakersfield.com to respond in the comments section to clarify my issues. What I’d like to see in the future is a paid feature where publishers can eliminate all ads from their printcast or select which ones appear / add their own. If I can get the above problems corrected and gain control over the ad space or eliminate it altogether I might consider Printcasting as the print solution for Metaprinter.

UPDATE:

See Printcasting creator Dan Pacheco’s response below and check out his new post about revenue streams at MediaShift Idea Lab

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6 Comments

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Gail Nickel-Kailing
Apr 19, 2009 11:04

Robert,

Wanted to try this out, but the video link results in this message “Sorry. This video is temporarily unavailable.”

Sounds like a really interesting application. I wanted to try the “print your blog” application that came out a while back, but it only works with a couple of blog platforms (I’m on WordPress) and only if the blog service hosts your blog. I host my own so that was out too.

Will try this on my own since you say “intuitive.” I’m just technical enough to get into trouble…

Have a great Sunday!

Gail

Robert Ivan
Apr 19, 2009 20:45

hmmm… the video embed on my site and at the printcasting site is working at this time. Give it another shot. The whole exercise of registering and publishing a printcast took me about 45minutes, but that was with reading the Terms of Use and some other background info. Thanks for reading and let us know how your experience turns out!

Dan Pacheco
Apr 20, 2009 9:34

Hi. I’m Dan Pacheco, and I’m the founder of Printcasting.com. I also serve as the product manager (among other things), so I can speak directly to all of the issues you bring up. But first I want to say thanks for using the site and providing feedback. We listen carefully to everyone’s requests and reports and use that to make the product better.

Your major complaint was about the text title showing up on top of your custom header image. We just launched custom headers a week ago, and we noticed the same thing. We plan to add a “No title” option in the header creation tool to address this.

Hyperlinks are something we’re still thinking about, and could use your help to find the best solution. Right now we remove them because the PDF output is optimized for printing, and blue underlined text makes absolutely no sense in a printout. But you have a good point about how we should not remove them from the microsites so we’ll add that to our improvement list. We also plan to display images there, and add a link near the top to the original blog entry.

I would be interested to hear ideas from you and others about how we might include hyperlinks in PDFs in a way that makes sense in printed form. One approach: we could add a box near the end of each edition with every URL (perhaps as a tinyurl for ease of use) and a citation number, then repeat those citation numbers in the text of the stories. Those numbers could be hyperlinked so that they click directly to the links for those people who read the PDFs on a computer.

Regarding your stories getting cut off: this is a tricky issue because of the magazine-style layouts we’re currently using. We continue to talk about this and, at minimum, we will try to add at least one more jump page for longer stories. Also, by this summer we plan to let you determine how many pages you want your Printcast to be, and we will add or remove jumps to fit. Displaying jumps as more of a “book form” in two columns could also help here.

We think the online “magazine view” content will be more readable when we increase the font sizes, which is already in the works. However, we’re limited in what else we can do there because we’re using a free add-on called Page-flip. There may be other commercial readers available that would be better, but we’re prohibited from using them due to the free open-source requirements of our Knight Foundation grant.

Finally, regarding ads, we will be adding quite a bit more control in the near future. You can expect to be notified when advertisers purchase ads in your publication, and you will have the option to accept or decline them (if you decline obviously you will also be declining that revenue, but that comes with the territory).

Good point on the terms of use. The “California only” provision was an artifact from our pilot initial launch in Bakersfield. We have since decided to pursue a national rollout sooner than originally planned so we will be removing that provision shortly. Anyone anywhere is encouraged to use Printcasting, and in the future you can expect to see pages that bubble up content based on cities and towns that have a lot of Printcasts and content.

I will be posting something about how advertising revenue will be shared on PBS MediaShift Idea Lab very soon, and will post a link here when I do. It should address a lot of your questions about advertising and money.

There are a lot of other improvements in store for the future — far too many to post here — but I wanted to directly address your feedback. If you have questions about what else is in our roadmap I’m happy to talk about them. I will be posting some of them on the PBS site as well.

Thanks again for all the great feedback, and for trying Printcasting.com.
- Dan Pacheco, Founder of Printcasting.com

Pounding the Pavement and Planning Ahead @ Dan’s Diner
Apr 20, 2009 12:40

[...] I’ll be sharing more anecdotes about community outreach in the coming weeks. In the meantime, we continue to improve the product based on feedback from people in Bakersfield and elsewhere (for example, see this review and our response on the Metaprinter blog). [...]

Charles
Apr 21, 2009 16:41

So this is a tool for hijacking other people’s content, is that it?

robert ivan
Apr 21, 2009 21:28

It’s an ad supported model, publishers that agree to use the site share in the revenue. It’s explained in greater detail here: http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2009/04/pounding-the-pavement-and-planning-ahead-for-printcasting110.html