Lightning Labels Blog

Gather All the Printing News at Alltop

Sometimes when you are trying to research a topic a google search can get frustrating. You often have to sift through pages of search results before gathering all the information you need. Wouldn't it be better to go to one location and find all the important news that is completely up to date? This is the idea behind Alltop, a new venture by Guy Kawasaki, the serial entrepreneur, venture capatalist and author.

Alltop gathers all the latest news from around the world and organizes it by topic, kind of like an online magazine rack. It pulls in news from traditional sources such as newspaper and magazine web sites, but also includes new media such as popular blogs and online forums. If you need to do research on ballroom dancing, woodworking or New Zealand then Alltop has you covered. Best of all it is updated every hour with all the latest news on every topic so you know you are getting only current information.

Recently a printing category was added to Alltop. It includes news from the commercial printing industry as well as label printing. So now all the news from our industry is gathered conveniently in one place at printing.alltop.com. And yes, you will find the Lightning Labels blog in there as well.

The History of Print

I came across this interesting article a couple of weeks ago on the history of print. It describes a rich history that starts way back around 1800 BC and continues all the way to the 21st century. The photo above is from one of the first rotary printing presses invented in the 1840's. For anyone involved in the printing industry it provides an interesting historical perspective.

The article does not mention the HP-Indigo press, which in my humble opinion was a very important part of the history of printing. But it does provide an interesting analysis of most of the major printing advances over the last several hundred years.

Introducing PrintWiki - What on Earth is it?

Adam Dewitz is a busy guy. He is a second year graduate student at the Rochester Institute of Technology studying Print Media, he is the author of the Printmode blog (a blog devoted to the printing industry), and now he has created PrintWiki - The Free Encyclopedia of Print. A wiki is basically just a type of web site that allows anyone to update the content - the most famous wiki is the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

The PrintWiki website provides a collaborative platform that enables anyone to contribute to the collective knowledge of the printing and publishing community. The goal of the site is to provide a comprehensive, open source encyclopedia of printing and publishing. It is not completely unregulated, there is a group of people led by Adam who will review entries to maintain the integrity of the information. But it is up to people within the industry to get involved.

I have joined the PrintWiki community and I did my first entry on label unwind direction. Now, I will be contributing further entries as time goes on - my focus will be on the label industry. So if you are an expert in the print industry I encourage you to get involved. The more entries that are created the more useful it will be for everyone.