Hi everyone and welcome to the first in a series of blogs about Printcasting.  In the coming weeks and months, I'll be posting here with news, tutorials and answers to frequently asked questions about Printcasting.  In the meantime, here's a primer for you and some links to the site and sample pages.

Last year, The Californian was honored with a grant from the Knight News Challenge to build Printcasting, a new idea for local news that allows anyone to quickly and easily create professional-looking printable magazines.  Now Printcasting is up and running in "beta" test mode, and we're hoping you'll take a few minutes to try it out and let us know what you think.

Just go to beta.printcasting.com and click on Create Your Magazine to get started.  From there, you just choose a topic for your magazine, pick and design and select from available articles (we've seeded Printcasting with Californian content, with more to come from community bloggers and groups).

Then, just wait for a minute or so and Printcasting will create a magazine for you.  For an example, see beta.printcasting.com/publisher/micro/12

Any feedback you have -- positive or otherwise -- would be much appreciated.  In fact, telling us about things that are confusing or otherwise don't work is what we need most right now to improve Printcasting, so don't be shy! Send your comments to printcasting@printcasting.com.  There might even be a free mousepad or notebook in it for you!

Congratulations to Dan Pacheco and Ron Robinson of our New Products team for bringing Printcasting to life!  There's still lots of work to do to fulfill the complete vision for Printcasting, but we are off to a good start and grateful to everyone in the company for supporting this new idea.