Reading about Gutenberg, movable type, and printing in general always makes me think about just how far we’ve come in the realm of communications and the ability to disseminate information. As many of you know, I’m a letterpress printer, using machines that aren’t much different from the ones Gutenberg himself worked with five hundred, yep, that’s 500! years ago!!!

On the other end of spectrum, though, is the work that I’m lucky enough to do every day in the realm of electronic communications. Read the Wired, This Day In Tech, article, and allow your mind to wander, thinking about, imagining, the world of lead type, and heavy cast iron that was needed to get a message out there. Then think back a bit further to a time of hand scribes, and no dissemination at all except what could be passed word-of-mouth.

It’s kind of hard to imagine especially in a world rapid-fire tweets, Facebook status updates, RSS feeds, and blog posts just like this one, that not too long ago there was no Web, or iPhone, or Blackberry or anything else that permitted such awesome real-time, in the moment, communication. Just sayin’… pretty awesome.

Our struggle now isn’t the media, but finding the attention to dedicate to it all… Exciting stuff.

Jason Kottke’s post Write Different reminds me of just how much Charles Bukowski has influenced me, and no doubt influenced a generation of writers on the Web directly, or indirectly. Thanks Jason!

I participated in an interesting Webinar yesterday called Using Social Media for Disaster Response and Recovery, that was put on by the PRSA (Public Relations Society of America).There were a lot of good points, but one point regarding Web content, particularly in the realm of social media, stuck with me; the idea that people aren’t reading they’re scanning so messages need to be brief and pertinent. This isn’t a particularly new concept, but as I thought about that it dawned on me that I “scan” hundreds of articles every day in my RSS feed aggregater… from that I might read two dozen, and feel obliged to write about one or two, generally… I’ve already started applying this brief/pertinent message piece to my Twitter and Facebook activity with the longer posts showing up here, but I might try working the brief/pertinent angle into this blog more…