Organizational life is full of outdated rituals, from office parties to annual performance reviews that do little to improve the quality of product, process, or personal experience. Technology can do away with many of them. For instance, an organization can do an online survey to find out how staff would really like to socialize. A [...]
Category Archives: Industry trends
News Finds Its Way Home
July 16, 2008As metropolitan dailies shrink and commercial websites struggle to entice advertisers, one news medium is enjoying unprecedented success: free weeklies. Bulging with local ads, they cost practically nothing to produce or distribute. They may provide little intellectual stimulation, but major news media and Web investors find them intensely interesting. How, they wonder, can we do [...]
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Don’t Keep Team Members in Solitary Confinement
June 24, 2008Today’s collaboration tools are great—your virtual team members can work just as effectively in another time zone as in the next cubicle. Instant messaging, video conferencing, file transfer, Microsoft SharePoint, virtual private network (VPN), and other whiz-bang technologies can link far-flung team members tighter than people on different floors of the same building used to [...]
Also posted in Management of a publications enterprise 1 Comment
Web Site Visitors Want It NOW
May 29, 2008It’s not your imagination. The world is moving faster and people are less patient. I switched from dial-up Internet access to a broadband connection only four years ago, and I’ve already forgotten what it was like to wait for Web pages to load. Now, when pages don’t load instantly, I’m irritated and tempted to move [...]
Also posted in Design, Framing content in print and on the Web 1 Comment
Meetings at the Online Virtual Water Cooler
May 21, 2008While I have many friends and colleagues from my time working at full-time jobs in real offices, my personal and professional networks have steadily grown in the 17 years I’ve been a freelance technology writer/editor/consultant. I was lucky that my independent career began at the dawn of the public Internet, which has been a primary [...]
Also posted in Management of a publications enterprise 1 Comment
A Fire Sale on Editorial Talent
May 19, 2008Is your publication or Web site recruiting experienced writers, editors, graphic designers, or photographers? You couldn’t ask for a better market. As the newspaper industry spirals downward, newsroom downsizing has sent hundreds of talented journalists on job searches. One of the best places to find talent is the Website of the Poynter Institute, the journalism [...]
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Joining Real-World Secret Societies
May 13, 2008In this hyper-connected age, it’s easy to think that just as all human wisdom and knowledge is available on the Internet, you can use today’s social networking Web sites to meet everyone worth meeting. In fact, both beliefs are wrong. Just as there’s a “deep Web” orders of magnitude larger than the visible Web, many [...]
Posted in Industry trends 2 Comments
Still a Breakthrough Away
March 12, 2008Here’s good news: TV viewing time is down to an average of 14.5 hours per week, from 21 hours in 1990. Here’s more, although it’s old news if you’re the parent of a teen-ager or a 20-something: Internet usage now averages 17.5 hours per week. That’s hardly news to the Barack Obama campaign staff either. [...]
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Civilized Networking that Pays Off
March 6, 2008Networking affords a way to deliver your organization’s messages to a broad audience and recruit clients, partners, and colleagues in the process. While networking sometimes gets a bad rap as self-centered and manipulative, it actually opens doors, solves problems, helps others, and lets them help you. Networking simply means meeting people, learning their interests, sharing [...]
Posted in Industry trends 1 Comment
What Modular Content Is Really All About
February 29, 2008There’s a lot of loose talk about “modular” content on the Web. But done correctly, it enables publishers to reuse print information online without a time-consuming rewrite. Even better in the long run, it delivers information in an efficient and memorable way that makes it more genuinely useful than ever before. Deborah A. Kenny, a [...]
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