Holtz Communications + Technology

A lot of voices are rising up to proclaim the death of the traditional website. For example, in a list of “10 Web Trends That Should Die in 2006,” the Google Blogoscoped blog suggests...

I hope in 2006, major companies who are still on the web 1.0 train will upgrade to the world of blogs, podcasts, RSS, etc., and replace their ???homepages??? with…

There are all kinds of intranets. Good ones and bad ones. Intranets that are strictly communication vehicles with maybe a smattering of other content. Intranaets that are nothing more than static repositories of policies and handbooks. Others are mostly application-driven, loaded with tools like benefits enrollment, budget planning, expense reimbursement, and the like. Some are balkanized fiefdoms of departmental sites…

You love , but you don’t like the cluttered home page? Harald Hanek, a German programmer, developed Gollum, a simplified interface that piggybacks on your existing browser. Currently, you need to visit the Gollum site in order to use it; a beta download is promised. Invoking Gollum brings up an interation of your browser that lets you enter your search term in…

So you like the idea of a wiki, but you don’t want to download and install one and you don’t want to pay to use one of the hosted alternatives. You could try the free Writeboard, a new entry into the world of wikis from 37Signals. Visit the site, complete a brief online form, and you’ll have a wiki up and running that’s…

In workshops and talks, I’ve been suggesting that the web has become balkanized. Three separate entities have emerged:

• The “reference web”— The traditional web where people go to extract information. Characterized by the receiver-driven model of communication, it’s all about pulling what you want when you want it.
• The “collaborative web”— Social media, consumer-generated content, conversations. This is made up of wikis, blogs, social networking sites, tag-driven sites, and…

As newspapers experiment with blogs and podcasts, it must have seemed like a good idea to the editors of the Los Angeles Times to see if another element of the social software suite could be put to good use. The notion of a wiki for newspapers isn’t new; after all, Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has been giving it a go…