HP has decided to do something about printing content from websites and blogs. At long last. They’re realised a lot of these 2.0 websites and most existing sites don’t print well and annoy the hell out of a lot of people so they’re developing plugins for blogs and websites so you can easily print pages or individual blog posts with ease. They’ve signed up BoingBoing into a beta test of this new print widget for websites. This is now the print option on BoingBoing.
People may already be familiar with their online mini-Publisher service on the main Tabblo site. Their developers toolkit for doing this kinda thing is released on June 29th and you can sign up on the site to get access to it. They’re also doing stuff so you can easily add captions to images. Seems quite basic but a great idea as it will encourage people to print off more of their work. Caption of the Day is their show site.
There will also be a plugin available for Movable Type powered blogs available on June 29th. Where’s the one for WordPress? Their own developer blog/site runs on WordPress like.
From a press release, you can see why they want to get into this game:
HP will seek to capture a significant share of the 53 trillion digital pages estimated to be printed in 2010 alone – an opportunity valued at more than $296 billion.
Content from the Internet accounts for nearly half (48 percent) of all printing done at home. Yet, many of the most popular destinations on the web – such as blogs and travel sites – have limited or non-existent printing capabilities. In an effort to broaden and improve the web-printing experience, HP is creating technologies to make it easy to print content from the Internet in a useful format.
HP also own Snapfish.com, an online photo printing service and also recently bought Logoworks so they seem to be getting into more of the content creation side of things too. Good. I think they should go into it a lot more and buy one of those online note-taking or scrap book type sites. Go to a webpage, take a snapshot, add some notes and illustrations and send to the printer. HP should turn the web into a colouring book, if you will. The tech is there, the raw materials for mashups is there and there are plenty of creatives there. Maybe the toolkit will allow people to do this?