Turning the web into print

Thanks to Matt Locke for pointing me in the direction of this lovely newspaper, created by the Really Interesting Group and featuring web content from 23 friends that they thought would work well in print.

Mine only arrived yesterday (#163 from a print run of 1000) and they are now sold out according to the website so I consider myself doubly fortunate to have a copy.

Three things caught my attention on my first browse through the pages, from back to front of course.

1) I've never really understood why so many people on Flickr take photographs of their food. Turning the page to see a full double page spread of 'food' tagged photos from Flickr user Antimega and it suddenly seemed to make sense. Very cool, and very possibly of some practical use as well.

2) Twitter. I'm a user, occasionally, and I can understand why some people find it useful, particularly when covering live events/conferences and so on. But I still don't quite get it. I've yet to find a killer reason why twitter is a necessary tool in my life. But somehow the four pages taken up entirely with tweets from @marsphoenix makes complete sense... and fascinating reading.

3) Russell and Ben's epilogue on the back page, titled "There May Well Be Mistakes", explains their reasons for collating this work in newspaper form, apologises for any errors that might be present, and ends with my favourite sentence of the year so far. "2009 feels like a year for printing and making real stuff in the real world. It's going to be exciting"

Now I'm going to start from the front page and read every single word.

(image taken from Matt's Flickr photostream)