EContent

Old News

It's not news that magazines are anorexic, newspapers are dropping in droves, and industry leaders are calling for everything from forbidding the use of headlines for linking to putting up pay walls around anything and everything. Certainly, it is possible that Yahoo! provides technology features that draw in so many viewers and make it worth paying for. Yet something about the assertion that the "human presence" might be a factor struck a chord with the author: The ease with which NYTimes.co...

Faces of Econtent

In an interview, David Farrell, University Archivist from University of California-Berkeley, talked about his personal life. David Farrell helps build and manage the archive collections of the University of California-Berkeley, which are the official and unofficial historical records of the university. He said that he is currently preparing an exhibition on Darwin that will open soon in their gallery. His outside interests are hanging out with friends, hiking, reading, and listening to music....

Email

Relevance (and Timing) Pays

As everyone moves into fall, the year-long revival of the paid content argument shows no sign of easing. The author has heard a growing conviction that emerging platforms and devices will help alter the relationship between digital content providers and their users. These ever-hopeful publishers point to the fees Kindle users pay for their digital newspaper and blog content and the success of paid content on the iPhone App Store. Nevertheless, mapping user need is going to be critical to unde...

Media Surveys Shed New Light and Confirm Old Suspicions

Two major reports released recently offer both confirmation of declining advertising and marketing spend and a glimpse at the areas for growth in the coming years. According to the Veronis Suhier Stevenson Communications Industry Forecast 2009-2013, Total communications spending will decline 1% in 2009 to $882.6 billion, but will grow 3.6% per year over the next five years to over $1 trillion. On the B2B advertiser side, Outsell Inc recently released its Advertising and Marketing Study 2009. ...

Peopleware

News & Product Briefs

Ddos Zombie Attack Plagues Social Networks

For social network junkies -- and companies that rely on sites such as Twitter and Facebook to interact with clients -- August 6 was a bleak day. A massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack targeting a single pro-Georgian blogger drastically slowed or stopped five major sites: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LiveJournal, and Fotki. Security teams worked around the clock to slow the damage as users grew more and more impatient, uncertain, and frustrated. Security researchers at McAfee Av...

With Recession Come New Data Loss Worries

This year, when Proofpoint Inc, an email security and data loss provider, conducted its annual study on outbound email and data loss prevention issues, it had an additional question in mind, says Keith Crosley, director of market development for Proofpoint. The question is whether the recession is creating an increased risk. A number of factors contribute to the increase in data loss. According to the study, half of the companies said that budget constrictions hindered the ability to protect ...

Blr Retrofits Its Brand

Business & Legal Reports (BLR) is making a change, albeit a subtle one. Now known as Business & Legal Resources, the company is, like so many others, realizing the value of its online business and making the changes needed to beef it up -- which includes a Web site overhaul and a rebranding as of September 22 that will highlight more than a year of strategic content initiatives. While BLR has been growing its online offerings, its main page -- which BLR CMO Kathy Greenler Sexton descr...

Justifying E-Discovery Systems

It is a long, drawn-out process to justify, evaluate, select, implement, and maintain an enterprise search system. The landmark 2006 Federal Rules of Civil Procedures Rule 26 and its updates make all electronic stored information (ESI) subject to legal discovery, and ESI continues its unbridled growth. Your work today to organize and classify information will make a future e-discovery process easier, and establishing good electronic records management programs will complement e-discovery. The...

Icyte.Com

Web pages might vanish between the time you discover them and your next visit. The desire to access otherwise evaporated pages spurred the creation of iCyte. Forget all that copying and pasting. Say goodbye to slogging through acres of possibly pertinent bookmarks. Add power to your research by collaborating with others. Set up is simple. Go to the iCyte homepage and click on Create Account. The next window that appears is the download page. iCyte performs three valuable tasks well: It stores...

Can 20th-Century News Survive in a Digital World?

Because newspaper production was well beyond the means of most people, people relied on newspaper and magazine publishing companies with the requisite resources to produce the news for them, and in return, they charged large sums of money for display and classified ads -- and they thrived. Today, that's all changed. The cost of content production and delivery on the Web has plummeted to almost zero. As a result, newspapers and magazines are failing at an accelerated rate. Whatever the reasons...

The Immersive Enterprise: Mobile Tools Empower the Anytime, Anyplace Workforce

Bigger, better, faster -- for more than a century people have been driving toward greater efficiency by creating routine or automated processes that cut time, costs, or both. Indeed, advances in communications and computing technologies, the advent of the mobile Internet, and the proliferation of advanced high-speed networks and devices are producing a new order in business collaboration, communication, and productivity. Determined to dismantle the barriers and restrictions that limit the con...

Confronting Compliance Phobias: Developing a Records Management Compliance Plan

The No 1 concern facing today's records managers is lack of consistent compliance on the part of employees and contractors with records management policies, processes, and procedures. While there are many different ways to ensure that there is consistent conformance across organizations, one method that should be considered is a records management compliance plan. Developing a records management compliance plan requires some thought to be put into understanding organizational cultures, legal ...

Top 20 Queries

In some recent projects, the author shown interviewees a list of the 20 queries. As he has developed the list and his interview approach over the past few months, he has also found that these questions start to help create use cases that can be applied in user testing. There seems to be very little in the literature about how to determine user requirements for information discovery, and often there is a focus on just the initial response to a basic search query. The author uses the term "disc...

Writing the Book On Enterprise 2.0

In an interview, Andrew McAfee, the man who first coined the term, Enterprise 2.0, in 2006, talked about Enterprise 2.0. According to McAfee, the Web 2.0 tools were demonstrating an ability to harness and share knowledge, make sure it stays current and findable, harness the brains of the company, and he coined the phrase Enterprise 2.0 to talk about the possibility of doing all that behind the firewall on intranets and extranets for selfish corporate purposes. Then he added that most knowledg...

Authenticity and Sincerity

On the Internet, nobody knows you're a fraud. Many marketing gurus today tell you your operation must be authentic or sincere. The terms aren't always used interchangeably, but the author finds the differences among authenticity, sincerity, and honesty subtle at best. Authenticity has to do with trustworthiness and sincerity has to do with being forthcoming -- and both seem to require honesty. The Sincerity Agency seems (assuming its Web site is authentic) to be devoted to ethical and green p...

A Case of Valuing Video at Risd

Founded in 1877, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) offers 16 undergraduate and 17 graduate programs as well as a 6-week precollege program designed for high school students. It only makes sense that a school like RISD would want its Web site to reflect the latest in technology and design aesthetics. So in 2004, RISD started making videos for potential students browsing its Web pages. As the school started to populate the site with its video content, problems began to arise. The videos were...

Re: Invention

In early June 2009, General Motors declared bankruptcy and launched a new "re: invention" initiative to engage with the public and share the ways that the company would emerge leaner and prepared to succeed. From the author's perspective, the marketing aspects of the re: invention rollout looked like a collection of the same old marketing stuff that hadn't served GM too well over its decades of decline. GM is beginning to humanize the company, and the re: invention process has been swift. Sev...