Death watch: Static destination websites

I understood Jonathan Schwartz’s enthusiasm when he suggested, during a talk a couple years ago, that a Sun Microsystems intranet really wasn’t necessary with so many employees blogging. It still didn’t make any sense to me, though. Would it really be easier to find benefits information on employee blogs than on an intranet benefits page? And how, exactly, would an employee enroll for benefits on a blog?

The same kinds of thoughts cross my mind as I hear all the claims that static web sites are dead. The rise of social media and the real-time web has certainly shifted the focus of the online community. There is no question: The era of… Read More »

One role for print: making dull messages stand out

Communicating mundane messages to employees is one of the tasks that has been made harder for internal communicators by the adoption of Web 2.0 capabilities on internal networks.

Consider, for example, the communication of a benefits enrollment deadline. There’s little that gets communicated inside companies duller than employee benefits information. But employees still paid attention 20 years ago because the reminder was one of a few messages being broadcast to employees. Back then, the role of communications was to produce one-way, top-down messages to ensure employees knew what they needed to know (like, for instance, not missing… Read More »

Serendipity: A strength of print

I was thumbing through my Sunday newspaper earlier this week when I came upon a full-page feature that, despite the dullness of the topic and my own lack of interest in government finance, drew me in. “State Budget 101” featured a cartoon professor walking you through a plain-English explanation of the key issues underlying California’s budget crisis with simple-to-understand charts and graphs. Here’s what it looked like:

It struck me, as I dug into the feature, that this is the kind of thing that newspapers should be doing. Enough innovative, useful material like this could entice a lot of people back to reading the daily dead-tree… Read More »

Deathwatch Case File #2: RSS

In a post on November 17, 2008, I created the Death Watch list, a rundown of various media whose death has been widely predicted. This is the second in a series of posts that takes a deeper dive into these.

A meme suggesting that Twitter is poised to replace RSS has been swirling through the social media space, but I largely ignored it as preposterous until Steve Gillmor reiterated and expanded on the suggestion in TechCrunch IT post. Gillmor, a contributing editor to ZDNet and host of “The Gillmor Gang” podcast, offers perspectives that bely a remarkable depth of insight into social computing, making his observations worthy of… Read More »

What’s a comic book geek to do?

“Print is dead!” shout the digital fanboys. “All tangible media will be gone by 2012,” proclaims Steve Rubel. If you listen carefully, you can hear the anguished screams of comic book geeks.

Well, not really.

Comic books—and especially graphic novels—are one form of print media that hasn’t made the transition to the Web. You can’t put an unread comic in a plastic sleeve marked as “mint.” You can’t smell the ink when you crack open a new issue, or gaze lovingly at the art and the inking that just wouldn’t look the same on a monitor. (I’m not into comics, by the way, but my wife has one hell of a collection.)

Consider the Marvel comic… Read More »

Death Watch Case File #1: Tangible Media

In a post on November 17, I created the Death Watch list, a rundown of various media whose death has been widely predicted. This is the first in a series of posts that takes a deeper dive into these.

A utopian vision has emerged in which every expression of human endeavor once conveyed via physical media is transformed into digital media. Micro Persuasion blogger Steve Rubel, a vice president at Edelman, has bet that “by January 2014…in the US almost all forms of tangible media will either be in sharp decline or completely extinct.” Steve lists print—books, magazines and newspapers—but also DVDs, boxed software, and video games.

The… Read More »

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