Living in DC, one of the things that you become very used to is the qualifying statement. A huge number of people in this town are either lawyers, politicians or aspiring politicians. For any of these professions, it doesn’t pay to get caught in absolutes. No matter what you believe, every statement must be qualified
Continue reading »Monthly Archives: "September 2005"
In the mail yesterday I came across a direct mail piece for www.basements.com with the warning "more hurricanes predicted" – aiming to convince me to waterproof my home. I can only hope that this piece was created before recent tragedies and not a deliberate attempt to cash in on the misfortune of others. But it
Continue reading »Photoshop had some great PR this weekend, from very unexpected sources. On Sunday evening, during the premieres for two of the most popular shows on televison: Desperate Housewives and The West Wing – characters in both shows were dealing with documents and mentioned having the ability to use Photoshop to change them. In Desperate Housewives,
Continue reading »Hotmail is dying. As I noted several months ago, my Hotmail account was the direct casualty of the coming of Gmail. There were even online eulogies. Despite every reason to keep using Hotmail (I use their messenger client, run windows at work, even have a complete address book set up at my Hotmail account) –
Continue reading »Most popular industry blogs offer multiple feed options for the simple reason that RSS feeds are being used by professionals in many industries to aggregate and consume "niche news." As an increasing number of news media sources offer their content through RSS feeds, this is becoming a defacto source for aggregating news in any industry,
Continue reading »The theory of an encyclopedia built through the collective contribution of thousands of laypersons seems to defy logic. After all, how can you rely on individuals to work together with relatively few rules in order to develop a common encyclopaedic view of the world? But despite the obvious problems, Wikipedia works – an online measure
Continue reading »Perhaps aiming to avoid the mistakes of Dell in ignoring Jeff Jarvis’ blog comments and experience, Chrysler PR chief Jason Vines has taken a wide swing in the opposite direction, lashing out at Steve Hall of Adrants in response to his (justified) posting about the new Firehouse.biz blog as being "stupid, illogical, idiotic and insane."
Continue reading »Most everything outside of the Internet is vertical. We walk upright. Skyscrapers are, well, sky-high. Books are printed in portrait sizes. Memos, printouts, legal documents too are all printed vertically. Newspapers, magazines, guidebooks – again, the majority are all vertical. Yet computer screens and TV screens are horizontal. Television and movies take advantage of this
Continue reading »A rising trend with the coming fall lineup for US TV networks is the desire and necessity to make shows more interactive. Though the leap of making all show content available online seems a stretch for most shows (FOX’s Reunion being a notable exception), legions of shows are using non-traditional ways to deepen their relationships
Continue reading »The unending focus on converting "browsers to buyers" has become a mantra for retail ecommerce sites driving an increasingly formulaic approach to interface design. Select a type of product, filter by brand, price, or size, select the one you think you want, and add it to your cart. Unfortunately, this negates the more frequent task
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