Just a brief comment on an Economist article abouth the death of yearbooks that found its way onto Hacker News.

It astonishes me how mainstream media inevitably take such a polar view of the analog-to-digital cultural transition. The thesis of the article is predictable - traditional yearbooks are expensive, but ‘permanent’ and nostalgic; whereas digital substitutes are cheap and accessible, but transient.

The nuanced position is ignored. Why couldn’t you utilize both digital and traditional mediums?

Here’s an idea…

Publish the yearbook as a pdf and email it to student, as well as storing it on your institution’s website for easy access by alumni who forget to back up. Then, provide the pdf to a friendly POD publisher so that alumni who want a hard copy can purchase one themselves - not just on graduation, but whenever they so desire. You could allay privacy concerns by using a password system.

Why not take it one step further - make the ‘yearbook’ a dynamic digital product, leveraging existing assets such as facebook, flickr, students’ blogs etc - like a friendfeed for a year-group of non-nerds. Alumni could access it whenever they’re feeling reminiscent, and would interact both with memories and current friend events. Periodically (say for reunions) you could have this render into a pdf that could again be distributed through a POD publisher.

Maybe this is too hard for a few students at an educational institution to do. If that’s the case, it could make for an interesting startup project for a young hacker.