Ford squeezes office into truck

Ford Motor unveiled a mobile office designed for the new F-Series truck that includes a touch-screen computer, printer, wireless broadband access and Global Positioning System. Ford, which introduced its mobile office at last week’s Specialty Equipment Market Association show in Las Vegas, is targeting general contractors but the first thing I thought of was farmers and ranchers. [C|net]

When we first started repurposing content from our farm network for the web, everyone said, “Farmers don’t have access to the Internet.” When we started streaming our audio reports, they pointed out, “Farmers are on very slow dial-ups and can’t access rich media.”

I’m no visionary. I just pull my head out of my ass a couple of times a day and take a look around. If your pick-up is your office, this is gonna make sense to a lot of farmers.

Jeff Jarvis: “Trapped by history”

“When you think about it, satellite radio and iTunes are the best positioned in the new world for pay content … Print content is pretty much all free by now. Networks and cable and program producers and all bound up in their mutually destructive deals. But iTunes enables the sale of content and Sirius is producing content worth paying for and neither is trapped by their histories. — Jeff Jarvis

Our company has the multimedia rights for 19 of the biggest and bestest colleges in the country. Would those legions of fans pay $.99 for some video highlights from Saturday’s big game, if they could do it quickly and easily and have them download automatically to their video iPod? Ch-ching!

Steve Rubel on corporate blogging

“In an ideal situation –weekly or even daily– someone is pumping the weblog with fresh compelling content. But any old content won’t do. Corporations interested in blogging need to add value to people’s lives. That’s the biggest key to a successful corporate blog that keeps people coming back. So what do I mean by add value? I mean give us a reason to read your blog. Give us something we can’t find anywhere else. Provide information that your customers, partners and prospects care about, not necessarily what you care about. Be a resource and a connector.”

5,655,320 pieces of digital crap

Phil posted our spam/virus stats for September. 95% of our inbound email is spam. And I’d say that percentage holds true for the crap that hits my USPS mail box. A bunch of shit I didn’t ask for and don’t want. As we used to sing back in the 60’s… deep in my heart, I do believe… there will be a day when we only see/hear messages that we want to hear. It’s closer all the time. So spam on you annoying turds. Make it while you can.

Three groups of journalistic awareness of weblogs

Group 3, “growing smaller every day, is completely unaware of what has happened in the past few years. They don’t know what a blog is. They are still upset that the company started a website and they don’t believe they should have to write for it.”

From an article by Paul Conley (“Learning the basics of conversational editorial“) in which he describes three classes of journalistic awareness of weblogs. [via E-Meida Tidbits]