The Printed Blog

Chicago and San Francisco already have free weekly newspapers. Yet, residents of those cities can expect another one: The Printed Blog. Sound like an oxymoron? Not to Joshua Karp, the paper's founder. As the name suggests, The Printed Blog will feature content culled from the blogosphere. The paper hopes to wed the best of both worlds: the democratic, inclusive ethos of user-generated social media with the traditional (and tactile) feel of the printed page.

Karp plans to expand the paper into a daily that is published in major cities throughout America. Local readers will eventually be able to use the paper's website to determine which blogs populate their edition. So readers in, say, Nashua, can customize their version of The Printed Blog according to the collective tastes of the city's end-users.

The Printed Blog represents (albeit in analog) what some social media critics are calling Web 1.5 — a kind of "curated" version of anything-goes user-generated content. The maiden issue hit the streets yesterday.