Friday 21 August, 2009

This was the title of our first experimental blog

To be honest I have been too ambitious over the past couple of years and instead of just blogging tried to set up a whole set of blogging systems. The whole thing became a project together with the project of renovating our several websites. As could be expected it became an endless struggle while blogging has become like personal computing -- personal. In the meanwhile Facebook has arrived and then twitter and here I am just beginning my serious blogging while the rest of world is already going to the post-blog era. A bit like writing about printing when the whole world has gone to the radio, television, Internet, cellphone, blog and twitter. Nevertheless, it is interesting to try and span these communication and broadcast technologies -- there must be a continuum and hopefully one's evolution in dealing with it can be made somewhat interesting.

Since I decided two days ago to just do it rather than wait for some bespoke and perhaps ideal solution I realised that the tools are not only marvelous but also easily accessible. I confess that I have taken the help of one of my young colleagues who is tolerant of my sometimes beleaguered activities. In the process we have actually started two more blogs -- one for colour management and standardisation and the other for publishing. That leaves me with the problem or opportunity of what to do with this blog. I think it will be best if it is used for general topics that include some of the business issues such as the decline or pressure on print prices, the human resource issues and also environment and green printing. These are issues which are discussed at least on the telephone every day with the readers of our trade magazines.

Originally envisioned as a kind of CEO blog, my colleagues advised me a few weeks ago that the blogs that would be successful for our business would be those that are technical or 'how to' blogs. So we have done with the two other blogs started yesterday but in this one I hope and the blogging team will tolerate my continued obsessions with the Indian economy and the Delhi traffic which I see as a metaphor for both chaos and change.

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