Some stuff people are printing in my room over the internet 

It’s been two weeks since we have made the decision to shut down Print Stuff. During this time we’ve got many e-mails and comments, helpful feedbacks in figuring out a way to launch a second chapter.

What happened in the first 48 hours of activity was that we became more and more concerned in what people were submitting. It wasn’t anymore about the concept, it was about the content. If printing everything people were submitting was cool at first, it quickly turned out kind of non sense. We were giving a physical shape to all the stuff, including those things we couldn’t stand even on the internet.

But this opened an interesting question: what is really worth of being printed and what is not?

I am not the one who could answer this question, but you are. The new Print Stuff is definitely automatic and fully crowdsoucerd. You upload the content and you decide what is going to be printed and what will stay forever confined to the digital domain. No more editing, the abuse check and the tolerance towards the vandalic crap will be a sentence emitted by the people, not only by the staff.

The process is not seamless and smooth as it was in the first days, but I guess it will give some interesting outcomes. I know the real time printing thing was dead cool and we kept it the same way. When your page collects enough votes, you are notified by e-mail, just follow the link to watch the printing show happening in front of your eyes. That’s it, now go print some stuff.

Kevin Holmes from The Creators Project has kindly asked me to answer a few questions about Print Stuff. His questions were insightful enough to take me a while to figure out some decent answers. He also had a perfect timing, asking me to reflect on things people were questioning me in comments and private e-mails. So here it is, head over and comment if you like/dislike.

In the past 48 hours almost ten thousand people from all over the world visited my website and printed their stuff in my room. This was exciting, the first 400 pages are much more interesting that I could have ever thought.

Thank you very much everybody! China, South Korea, Brasil, Chile, South Africa, India, Ukraine, Germany, Cameroon, France, Italy, Finland, Belgium, United States, Canada, Japan, Thailand, Taiwan, Australia, Greece and a lot more places are included in the first 400 pages. Lots of cats and jokes and weird stuff are perfect together with all the memories, the amusing messages and all the sentimental pictures. I got also two marriage proposal, one from Israel and one from Thailand. Cool.

Creative Applications was the first blog to talk about the project then it spreaded widely through the social networks. Twitter has gone crazy about it (this led me to open this useless Twitter account btw). As I was expecting from the beginning I progressively lost control and the prints started getting weird. All those whismical and peaceful images, even dogs and naked people were having some interesting feeling to me, left place to the dark side. Lots of jokes, visual offensive material and extreme porn. This was making some people feeling uncomfortable and I noticed a progressive decreasing of the overall quality. The wild, unconsidered, brutal side of the internet took control over my project. I knew this could have happenend, but not so quickly.

I guess the link ended up in the wrong places. Even Penthouse Magazine twitted something about the project, that’s amazing, but maybe could have had something to do with all the porn stuff.

I now feel like shutting down everything for a while (maybe twelwe hours, maybe a week). I cleaned up the gallery as well, I am sorry about the censorship thing but I had to. If you find some of your stuff deleted by mistake, please contact me.

Now what? I don’t know. I’ll be working on the first 400 pages and, in the meanwhile, I’ll think about a way to keep the project alive, which is also kind of expensive to be maintained at the moment. I guess I should also put together a censorship-free version of the gallery to put somewhere. I’ll post all the news shortly. If you have any advice or idea please comment below or drop me a line.

When I found myself thinking about the right “fake” name to put below the name field in the homepage form, I didn’t know what to do. John Smith? Mario Rossi? They both work, but they just doesn’t sound right. In the end I come to the decision of picking each time a different random name from a list.

The growing list of names includes actors, directors, physicists, character names from tv series and films. I actually find kind of hilarious to read “eg. Joey Tribbiani” or “eg. Benjamin Linus” as a name suggestion, but nobody is going to notice that except you, reader, and me. At the moment there are twelwe of them. Could I waste my time in a much better way than this? I guess I couldn’t.

I needed some nice paper for my inkjet printer and I still couldn’t believe it took me so long to find it. I was looking for some sort of yellowish warm paper because I wasn’t satisfied with the cold feeling of the common one.

Obiuvsly nice paper are also expansive and expansive paper are inappropriate for a project like this one. In the end I found four different paper with four different yellow hues, each one with its pros and cons (one was cheap but too light and the ink passed through, one was ink-safe but too much yellow and so on). I ended up buying some paper called Cotton Wove by Fedrigoni.

It was A3+ size and needed to ask a friend of mine to cut it in half in order to fit the printer. I got only a few hundreds of these so I will probably need to change paper in future. I don’t even want to think about that now.

Finally figured out an introduction to the project. This is basically the «learn more» text you can find in the project page.

That is, you are invited to print out some stuff with my inkjet printer. There’s a little form above, you are asked to submit a short message and a picture. Since this stuff is going to be on paper, I guess they should be paper-worthy in some sense. I think of memories, advices, beautiful or ugly things, but the process is fully automated and nobody will stop you from sending out anything you can think of.

In the background there’s my printer, well… printing. It’s real time, just fill in the form and wait, you’ll see the page coming out (queue status in the system indicator up there). What happens next? I think I’ll try to bring all the pages together in some sort of crowdsourced book. Check the blog and gallery to learn more, for everything else drop me a line.

I’ve been really unsure about building or not a gallery. The thing is that I wanted the people to be focused on the service itself by watching my printer sending out stuff in real time, which btw I find interesting and kind of addictive. But as the streaming quality decreased, due to the hard compression of the images and the update timeout that changed from 500 ms to over one second, the idea of a gallery started making sense. It could be also a way to show the whole collection to everybody, partecipants or not. A nice feature that allows everyone to enjoy a little more the project and its results.

It took me some time to figure out how to do a live gallery which updates itself as soon as something is being printed but I figured it out, I’ll be writing something about the technical stuff later. I put also a “widget” on the homepage with the last two submissions. I keep wondering if I should allow people to comment or vote their favorite print, but this 2.0 fever may be just useless this time. Here is the gallery. To do: think of some sort of pagination.