Jeff Jarvis reports: “Last night, ABCNews.com called asking for me to make a video at home with comment on AppleTV. I taped it, edited it, and FTPed it in and now here is the finished product.”
If you are a reporter in 2007 and you have no idea how to do what Jarvis did, your days are numbered.
That is one of the lessons of Web 2.0, according to AdWeek’s Bob Greenberg:
“Long before they became global behemoths, the great (advertising) agencies of the past were small businesses built around people of uncanny creative ability. What’s amazing is that our competition in the future will come from exactly where we started: small teams of creative geniuses with ideas galore on how to capture the hearts and minds of consumers. Only now they probably don’t work in agencies. At the same time, they have a fully democratized means of content distribution that doesn’t rely on captive audiences. Lesson No. 2: Talent is more important than size.”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports (subscription) that a single iPod vending machine sold thousand dollars worth of iPods in one month. A VP of Business Traveler Services is quoted as saying, “We’ve done about $55,000 in a month in gross sales just for the one on Concourse A.
From usability expert Jakob Nielsen’s useit.com. I’ll plead guilty to #2 and #5 on a few of our sites. I’m iffy on a couple more. If you have a blog (or any kind of website), this is a handy check-list.
1. Bad Search
2. PDF Files for Online Reading
3. Not Changing the Color of Visited Links
4. Non-Scannable Text
5. Fixed Font Size
6. Page Titles With Low Search Engine Visibility
7. Anything That Looks Like an Advertisement
8. Violating Design Conventions
9. Opening New Browser Windows
10. Not Answering Users’ Questions
“Instead of sitting in chairs, workers stand in front of a raised workstation and slowly walk on a treadmill. Normally Levine keeps to a one-mile-per-hour pace, which requires little effort or concentration, allowing him to focus his attention on work. But the speed is fast enough to do some good, burning an extra 100 calories an hour – 8,000 calories over a 40 hour work week.”
“The researcher behind the project, Dr. James Levine, says his recent research shows that thin people tend to be on their feet an average of two and a half hours a day more than people who are overweight. Getting office workers up out of their chairs led him to build a prototype ‘treadmill workstation’.”
[ConsumerAffairs.com]
In one of Clyde Lear’s early blog posts, he talks about a mistake our company made some years ago. No weasly words, just “we shouldn’t have done that.”
I flashed on Clyde’s post as I read this article by David H. Freedman at Inc.com:
Many corporate blogs are sanitized, public-relations-oriented affairs intended to create bonds with existing and potential customers. Others serve as internal message boards to keep employees up to date. But I’m proposing something else: a blog that encourages employees and managers to tell their peers what they themselves have done wrong. It’s an easy step that could quickly effect a large, positive change in your corporate culture.
Kevin O’Keefe (Real Lawyers Have Blogs) points to an interesting article about benefit managers putting content, such as benefits and wellness updates and bonus guidelines, online without always going through IT. The benefits department can easily become a news publisher of compensation and benefits information.
Pleased to say that we’ve been doing that at Learfield for some time now.
Kevin also reports at least one of his clients giving iPods to employees so as to keep employees abreast of company human resources matters and training materials. The iPods come preloaded with relevant content with updates streamed to employees via the net.
Now, that is a wired company.
Jeff Jarvis points to examples of how some newspapers are trying to survive in the online world:
DelawareOnline is reorganizing the paper’s newsroom to be platform agnostic. A few years ago, only four people could post on the web but now 50 can and the number of web updates skyrocketed. They are a small paper and so they are not throwing staff at this; they are throwing simplicity at it: They are using iMovie and GarageBand to produce multimedia. He said that they have had four people leave because multimedia is not for them. I see that as a very good thing. Welcome to the future, newsroom. Says Paul: “There is no online department. It has ceased to exist. We are the online department. The newsroom is the online department.”
News organizations that are unable or unwilling to grasp this and make the transition will die.
The Micro Mosquito from Interactive Toy Concepts is a tiny high-tech toy helicopter that flies like the real deal. This radio-controlled copter can soar, dive and even hover in place. Available now at Radio Shack for $70, the Mosquito is rechargeable and flies for about eight minutes on one charge. This indoor toy includes a controller and a landing pad that doubles as a recharging platform.
The entire helicopter is six inches long with rotors 6.3 inches in diameter, and weighs less than an ounce. You can launch the Mosquito from any surface — a table, a hand or the floor — and it has two beady green L.E.D. eyes for night missions. It is made to work in small spaces but is susceptible to breezes and fans, making flights a bit dangerous if the window is open. (NYT)
ALL-CAP TEXT REDUCES READING SPEED BY ABOUT TEN PERCENT. MIXED-CASE LETTERS HAVE VARIATIONS THAT BREAK UP THE TEXT INTO RECOGNIZABLE SHAPES, WHEREAS A PARAGRAPH IN ALL CAPS HAS UNIFORM HEIGHT AND SHAPE, MAKE IT APPEAR BLOCKY AND RUN TOGETHER. ALSO, THE USE OF ALL CAPS CAN SEEM CHILDISH AND AMATEUR, OR AGGRESSIVE OR UNPROFESSIONAL. RESERVE ALL-CAP TEXT FOR SHORT HEADINGS AND TITLES, AND FOR SHOUTING.
Prioritizing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen, Hoa Loranger.