Holtz Communications + Technology

The next time management asks workers at its Benecia, California, facility to lend a helping hand, the answer is likely to be something along the lines of, “Sure, hyappy to help, just as soon as the Stanley Cup Playoffs are held in hell.”

Who would be willing to offer discretionary effort at management’s request after several workers were fired for allegedly doing just that? This…

I’ve just added provided by the free 4Q service to my website. I can’t wait to find out of my site sucks.

“Sucks,” according to a recent Advertising Age article, is a word Avinash Kaushik uses a lot. Kaushik, Google’s Analytics Evangelist and author of “Analytics in an Hour a Day,” which I have been reading off and on for the last couple of weeks (not to mention a…

Ragan Communications—one of my clients—has produced a video of an interview with Jorge Cauz, the president of Encyclopaedia Britannica, another one of my clients. I love it when synergies like this happen. How often can you hype two clients in one post?

Ragan also has a write-up on WebShare, Britannica’s initiative to provide bloggers with access to Britannica content. Staff writer Melissa Underwood…

What is the evolutionary path of social networks? Blogs might hold the answer. In the early days of blogging, blogs were independent units, unafilliated with other web content. Sure, you could link to your blog from elsewhere, but they didn’t integrate into websites. Today, it’s not uncommon to see “blog” listed as a core element of a website (like this) or even serving as the…

The 30-second spot isn’t dead, just our patience with being interrupted by them. Those “America’s Favorite Commercials” specials in prime-time television draw strong enough ratings to prove that people—at least, some people—are willing to sit and watch half-minute tales used by advertisers to pitch their wares.

Nothing symbolizes the vibrancy of the 30-second spot more than the Super Bowl, even though many of the big-budget commercials…

Companies should worry about the experiment Rogers is undertaking in Canada.

Rogers—one of the largest Internet Service Providers in Canada—has begun inserting ads at the top of screens, above the website to which customers have navigated. (A screen shot of Google’s spartan home page defaced by a Rogers ad was oroginally posted to Lauren Weinstein’s blog. Google, of course, authorized nothing of the sort.)

The…