Of mice and men......

For better or worse, the personal computer has changed our lives. Looking back 20 or even 10 years, few of us had ventured into cyberspace, and websites, e-mails and chatrooms were unknown and untried concepts. Today, there are few areas of life that are not touched by computers. Leaving aside job-related applications, around which an entire subsector of the pharmaceutical industry has grown up, it is possible to buy your groceries, purchase a car, run a company or even find a spouse without moving away from your screen.

The advantages for communications are obvious - you no longer need to get up at 3am to communicate with someone in Japan or Australia, and you can feed the most arcane topic into a search engine and be sure that someone somewhere has an answer of sorts.

The dangers are less obvious. How many times have you sent an e-mail to someone sitting a couple of desks away rather than get up and speak to them? It sounds trivial, but how many potentially good ideas have failed to see the light of day because people are interacting with their machines rather than with each other?

Which is why it was reassuring to see so many people - both visitors and exhibitors - at October's CPhI show and at the PPMA in September. After last year's understandably subdued atmosphere, both events had a real buzz about them, as if industry was determined to show that neither hell nor high water, terrorism nor worldwide economic recession would stop it going about its business.

So much for predictions that the web would sound the death knell for exhibitions in their current form. The 'virtual show' may have seemed like a good idea at the time, but it simply can't deliver the human contact, or the ability to touch and feel the product that continues to draw people to events like CPhI and PPMA.

In fact, research carried out for PPMA organiser Reed Exhibition Companies, in connection with the launch of its Total Processing and Packaging show in 2004, revealed that exhibitions rank second only to personal recommendation as a way of sourcing new suppliers, followed by the trade press and the internet.

So the timing of the launch of the Manufacturing Chemist website to coincide with CPhI was particularly appropriate. The aim is not to replace the printed magazine, but rather to complement it with added value services and increased convenience for our subscribers.

I'd be very interested to hear what you think, so feel free to e-mail me with your comments. Or telephone me, if you prefer, on +44 1732 470025 - after all, like you, I'm human too .