Making the internet real

I've always quite liked stuff that makes the internet real, making something you see on the screen an actual event or thing. I started thinking about it when I saw this talk by Russell Davies called 'Printing the Internet'

Watch live streaming video from liftconference at livestream.com

If you can't be arsed to watch a 25minute video. The highlights are as follows;

- A website that allows you to create a newspaper with as few as 5 copies e.g. to take away as a wedding memento. Lovely idea.http://www.newspaperclub.com/ I love my ipad. It kind of lets you get involved physically in the internet, but not really. That's why I still buy a newspaper rather than reading it on my ipad.

- Translating social media data into something physical. The best example is a program that calculates the amount of time that you spend on each website or Microsoft program and delivers you something real that represents that time or volume e.g. a Twitter snowman whose head corresponds to the number of followers that you have. It's a real version of this http://visual.ly/twitter Real things are intuitive and instantly make sense, like using an ipad.

I was reminded of this when I saw this from KLM. There's a series of replies to consumer's Tweets using cabin crew to display the letters. Online - offline - back online. Lovely.