My Interview with Michael Jahn

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing a true industry veteran, Michael Jahn. He's a printing industry consultant, color specialist, PDF evangelist and glob-trotting presenter. He's also a surfer, goof-ball and trickster.

We talked about what's changed for content creators, designers and publishers in the last 20 years. He's been involved with PDF since it was just "P" (for postscript). He describes why now is one of the most exciting times ever for digital publishing.

We spoke in Orlando just before his CRE8 presentation entitled, "What Color is Your Cheese Doodle?"

To learn more about the CRE8 Conference on Creativity & Technology, see my posts from the show.

To enter the mind of Mr. Jahn, view his blog.

This video is presented using the Veoh service. Learn more about Michael Eisner and his connection to this company.

PDFs with Video

15 years ago Adobe had the foresight to launch a format that was cross-platform, cross-browser and behaved the same on different computers and printers. Today the PDF document format is a major standard for those of us who consume and distribute content on digital platforms.

This month they added support for video! This is great news for digital content creators and distributors. Although it is simple for us to post video on YouTube or a million other services, the fact that we can now create context for our video is exciting. Sure, we can embed video into our websites. But, more and more, destinations on the web are becoming irrelevant. In the early days of the web we were attempting to attract eyeballs to a particular URL. Today, even though portals are a solid business model, we are increasingly seeing the content travel to the viewer rather than the other way around. Now we can package video content up nice and neat and deliver it to our audience.

Learn more at the Adobe site. There is also a good story on The Murcury News where they describe it this way, "along with adding video to documents, Acrobat 9 is intended to let users create professional-looking "portfolios" - combining text and graphics with video, 3-D representations and other applications - and store them as a .pdf file that will appear the same to anyone who views or prints it."