Three Minds reminds us that Penguin Books UK “has challenged some of its top authors to create new forms of story – designed specially for the internet.” Tag line: Six authors, six stories, six weeks. The first installment, created in partnership with Six to Start, launched last week and incorporates Google maps. (Thanks, Meg!)
Monthly Archives: March 2008
Ad Dollars Continue Online Shift
PQ Media believes that “non-traditional” advertising expenditures in 18 “emerging” markets will reach $160.8 billion in 2012. The category includes “online videos, store-based TV screens, sponsored events, TV and movie product placements, cellphones, video games and digital video recorders.”
According to their research, the category “online search’ will grown to $26.1 billion and “e-direct marketing” to $22.1 billion. But the big growth area, is rich media, which they predict will almost quadruple to $12.2 billion.
Why Do We STILL Have Ugly URLs?
Look at this (asp) monstrosity!!
http://www.jhm.org/ME2/Sites/dirmod.asp?sid=&type= gen&mod=Core+Pages&gid=A6CD4967199A42D9B65B1B08851C402B&SiteID= 8112722C039B4E508F0AB8552B898895
Who spec’d this site? Oh wait, that assumes someone knew what they were doing and didn’t simply leave all decisions to programmers.
When I worked at Boeing 10 years ago, we developed a simple system to “marry” human-readable URLs (in this case, something like http://www.jhm.org/about/pastor_hagee.html) to the database gibberish reflected above. TEN years ago! And how long has TinyURL and SnipURL been around? Gads. The more we go forward we actually go backward?
A Critique of Corporate Blogs
Boston Business Journal (no by-line) opines that business blogs are “dying off” and then proceeds to provide a few anecdotes based on Boston-area corporate blogs.
What the BizJournal — and maybe some corporations — fail to understand is that you can’t just “add a blog” to your website and expect miracles of any sort: community, conversation, transparency. Social media aren’t an “add on.” Either they fit in a corporate culture or they don’t — which isn’t to say that corporate culture can’t be changed. (How’s that for a lot of double negatives!)
The article also ignores the use of social media inside organizations and the less “formal” perhaps employee blog. Looks one of those “this is the story we want you to write” kind of assignments.
Business Collaboration Webware
cNet highlights four Web 2.0 business collaboration tools: Blist online database (Seattle-base — check it out!), Cozimo for image and video collaborative annotation, LiquidPlanner for project management (my students recently used WetPaint, another local startup, for a small project) and SlideShare (I required my undergraduate students to use SlideShare winter quarter).
Of these four, I use SlideShare the most — it’s a great tool for browsing, either for inspiration in presentation design or for ideas. I’m part of a few WetPaint communities but I don’t seem to be a wiki junkie. I’m looking forward to testing Blist’s collaboration feature with a crowd-sourcing project. I’ll probably never use Liquid Planner and don’t see a current need for Cozimo, although I find it the more intriguing of the two.
