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A bit of thinking out loud, this one.

I don’t think Warren Ellis‘ BAD SIGNAL email list is archived anywhere on the interwebs so I reproduce this recent email with apologies:

Here’s an idea I float out there every couple of years:

Years back, I stole a term from Bruce Sterling, “ideological freeware” — this predated Creative Commons — and applied it to the notion of web distribution of printed matter. We were talking in terms of the dearth of good writing about comics. Simply put, one could create a small magazine about comics and format it for cheap copying in black and white, and free it so anyone could print off copies. And then put it in comics stores. Viral distribution from pixel to print. SAVANT was the one that took up the entire idea, and the first twenty or so numbers of that were fireworks.

I’m talking specifically about web-to-print here, rather than the mags where the PDF was the end result, not the intermediate form.

What occurred to me after that, that I don’t think anyone picked up, was the broadside format. The single sheet. The broadside has a centuries-long history as a device for disseminating news and ideas.

I mean, flyers go up on the web to be printed off, sure. But it’s not quite the same thing. Getting an idea, or a piece of writing, on a single sheet and saying, yes, print this off, copy it and distribute it wherever you like — that’d be interesting.

In web terms, the costs are tiny — host the image on a free hosting site if you’re worried about the bandwidth hit. Use Livejournal or Blogger for the whole thing.

Hell, I might even do it myself one of these days…

The Guardian’s printable G24 is a very nice thing but a one-sheet for the bus, bog or bed would be even better.

It’s an appealing idea and I’m pretty sure it’s one that hasn’t caught on in blogging (at least, if it has, it hasn’t caught on in a widespread way that I’ve heard of). A facility that aggregated a favourite blog’s last five posts (say) into an attractive, printable one-sheet would be rather haveable, I think.

Read it and then leave it on the bus or park bench for someone else. Fold it into a paper aeroplane and send it to a colleague across the office. Virtual virus to a paper-based one. Hmmmm.