TOTW: Three weeks on
Posted on November 15th, 2009 in making things
In about six hours, this week’s T-shirt of the Week — the little bit of weekly madness brought to you by Warren’s brain and my machine shop — expires. If you’re reading this on my site, there’ll be a little countdown widget there in the sidebar giving you the precise (to a factor of “pretty much”) time to live, which you can, if you like, stick in your own blog and watch it automagically update tomorrow with the new TOTW.
Will tomorrow’s design be niftier? Who knows? I’m taking the opportunity that a weekly project affords to try and up my game each time… but whether you like the next (or the next, or the next) better is, well, it’s all a bit like Let’s Make A Deal, isn’t it? Only instead of fabulous prizes and curtains named Door #4, it’s fabulous bits of silly on whatever clothing options we’ve decided to offer this week. But the basic premise stands: Either you decide this week’s is the design you want… or its gone and that’s that.
Which is something worth taking a closer look at, I think, because it seems a bit counterintuitive to the whole idea of the internet and POD.
If there’s anything we know about the internet, it’s that it’s going to be forever, innit? It’s one big giant archive of information going all the way back to the dawn of time, certainly. And that’s incredimazing, of course — we’re adding to the archives every day as things like Google Book search add out-of-print titles, and the Wayback Machine does its best to even give us snapshots of now-dead sites. Mp3 repositories are adding out-of-stock or never-in-stock bootlegs and live recordings of music. Nasa are putting up snapshots of dead stars (that’d be the dawn of time almost-hyperbole). It all comes down to this: If it’s online, there’s no need to act fast. You can bookmark it with Delicious and get around to it next week, if you like, or next year, or never.
And, with POD, there’s really no “…while supplies last!” either. That’s brilliant, too, of course — a huge part of putting Shivering Sands on Lulu is just that: it can stay there as long as Lulu does, still pulling in a sale or two in ten years.
But, although I’m not advocating a fake or forced sense of urgency — because that’s a bit cheap, and more than a bit insulting to folks’ intelligence — there is something to be said about exploring how some online and POD systems do lend themselves to Being An Event.
It was Warren that first brought my attention to the concept of Event Internet (although he calls it “Appointment,” but I don’t love those so I’ve renamed for comfort), so I’m riffing off his playbook, here. But he’s certainly not the only person playing with the idea. There’s the well-documented Twitter-Flash-Mobbery that Amanda Palmer’s been pushing for a while, or Eliza Gauger’s Sweatshops, for instance. Hell, just a few minutes ago, Wil sent me a link to this, saying: “It redraws random fractals every few seconds. You can’t save them, so you just appreciate them and then wait for the new one to show up.” Which isn’t precisely an “event,” I suppose, but it sums up the idea rather nicely: You can’t save everything — although you can often record the live event to watch later — but sometimes, some things, even online, are about this moment. And when they’re gone, you missed it.
So what the hell could that possibly have to do with Print On Demand which, as I just said, is so great because it just stays there forever? Well, it’s all about looking at the tools in your kit and thinking about new ways to use them.
Cafepress, for instance, only allow one of each item at any given time in a free shop. Oh, sure, Warren and I could open a new shop every week, I suppose — except then you start running into the law of diminishing return visitors, as older store URLs get lost and forgotten. There are ways around that, too, if that’s how you want to use the Cafepress toolset — but we decided to turn that built-in constraint into feature. Hence, each week we only have one of each item — and when we want a new design, we turn over (almost) the whole stock. (We do have a few items that will stay forever, and that’s the beauty of that.)
But where it starts getting really interesting is when you start thinking “What else could I do?”
Brian Wood, for instance, delighted me yesterday with this little tidbit: “I have a POD book done through Lulu and for each convention I brought it to I changed the contents and cover of the book slightly, doing new print runs each time. You can upload and replace the print file as often as you like, which is great.”
Think about that for a moment: Lulu allow you to upload new guts and/or covers for a single book as many times as you want. What else could you do with a constantly updating physical object? Corrections and updates, surely — but what about yearly volumes that over-write the last? A URL-as-and-to-palimpsest of new-growth writing taking over the pages that may no longer be culturally relevant in this moment. Is it a counter-intuitive use of what we think of as a book? Perhaps. But its interesting, too, isn’t it?
What about POD magazines with no back-catalogue? What possible use is that? I dunno, yet, but I’m thinking about it. Even that little widget there in the sidebar, when it automagically updates in a few hours, it’s going to be something new and never revisited. And sure, that’s not a physical thing… except your eyes do say it’s there, so it sort of is.
I’m awfully close to entering one of my fugue states where I just start saying things that don’t exist yet in a stream of barely decipherable consciousness, so I’m going to leave off with this: don’t just think about format as “how we get stuff from Point Brain to Point Audience” — think about why we use formats that are “permanent” or “ephemeral” or “static” or “dynamic”, and what we can do with any and all of the above.
And I’ll see you tomorrow with a new T-shirt of the Week.
