Holtz Communications + Technology

In another sign of what portals could be, the AJAX-based personal web portal PageFlakes has introduced a module that puts customer relationship management (CRM) a click away. The module, which interfaces with Etelos’ CRM applications, includes contacts, appointments, task lists, call lists, and a host of other options, all of which can be networked with co-workers’ data. The basic elements of the CRM…

Back in the very early days of the web, I used to sometimes visit URL Routlette. Click the roulette wheel and the site would drop you on some random web page. I was fascinated to find out the site still exists—and doesn’t look much different than it did in 1998, although it know features Google ads.

URL Roulette is the very definition of…

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to my friend Dan York’s May 2 post asserting that the Web is fragmenting into a landcape dotted with countless walled gardens.

Dan’s obviously given this a lot of thought himself. Recalling the walled gardens of online services like CompuServe, Dan sees currently popular services like Facebook and LInkedIn as a return to the likes of these…

David Kiley, writing in BusinessWeek’s “Brand New Day” blog, likes the way Shell Oilteased him from a snort commercial on MSNBC to the company’s website where he watched an appealing nine-minute video. The tease approach has been effective before: Remember Nike’s cliffhangere commercials that required a visit to the website to see how they ended? But there are other ways to seed a video.

Business…

A friend of mine is fighting the good fight at her company, trying to convince the powers that be that a job she wants to fill belongs in the Communications department and not in IT. It seems like a no-brainer to me, but she’s running into stiff resistance. I have her permission to share this snippet from her email to me:

I???m…

I tried Snap.com on this blog for a week or so and asked readers to give me feedback. I got one comment supporting the tool; all the rest hated it. They didn’t just dislike it or prefer my blog without it. They loathed it.

So I was skeptical when I read that Snap.com had introduced SnapShots, which turns links into widgets. They…