Monday, December 19, 2005
HC+T Update: December 2005
The December 2005 email newsletter from Holtz Communication + Technology, in blog/RSS format.
HC+T Update
December 2005
- Webinars Are Back! First Up: Social Communication
- The Evolution of Intranets
- Honeywell Employees Are Blogging
- Putting Some Structure To Blogging
- “I’m Going To Sue The Internet”
- Another City, Another Slam At PR
- Podcasts As Conversations
- Typography On The Web
- Site of the Month
- HC+T Update
- Boilerplate And Subscription Information
As usual, this issue represents mostly material I’ve written for my blog over the past month. You can find the blog at http://blog.holtz.com. And don’t forget, you should seriously consider switching from the email subscription to the RSS feed. Just add the following URL to your RSS news reader: http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/rss_2.0/.
1. Webinars Are Back! First Up: Social Communication
Bring the Power of Social Software to your Intranet
with Shel Holtz, ABC
Five consecutive Mondays
Beginning January 9, 2006
By now, you’ve no doubt been inundated with material about social software like blogs, wikis, podcasts, social tagging, citizen journalism…the list goes on! What you may not know is that you can tap into the power of these tools to enhance your internal communication. You can even designate part of your intranet as a place for employees to share knowledge and publish news that just isn’t important enough to warrant the attention of the employee communications staff. In fact, there are companies already doing this—and they’re not all the usual high-tech suspects you might expect.
Shel Holtz, ABC, one of the world’s leading authorities on online communication, understands these technologies and how they can add exciting new dimensions to your communications at practically zero cost. And he has the examples to prove it works!
In this Webinar, you’ll learn:
- How to use a blog to supplement or even replace your current news delivery process.
- How employee blogs can make the whole organization smarter, faster, and more competitive.
- The role of citizen journalism on the intranet, which lets employees publish their own news.
- The value of a company-specific version of “wikipedia” inside your organization.
- Why a podcast can be a better way to deliver news and information than text.
- How to convince management to let you adopt these new technologies.
During the Webinar, you’ll benefit from lectures, links to other online resources, downloadable handouts, and interaction with your instructor as well as other Webinar participants. All this costs only $175—a fraction of what you’d spend on a similar session in a hotel meeting room—and you’ll never have to leave your desk.
Webinars are asynchronous—you participate when it’s convenient for you. A new lecture is posted each Monday morning, but you can take advantage of it whenever you have the time. You can view a video introduction to Webinars and tour a demo Webinar at http://webinar.holtz.com. That’s also where you’ll register.
Don’t miss the opportunity to learn to conduct these audits for yourself. Register today!
2. The Evolution Of Intranets
A lot has been made in the last couple days over Sun Microsystems President Jonathan Schwartz’s assertion that “intranets are going to die.” Schwartz, who made the remarks during a talk at Yahoo!’s Syndicate conference in San Francisco, noted that blogs will replace them. His prediction comes shortly after Ross Mayfield told BusinessWeek blogger/podcaster/reporter Stephen Baker that wikis could replace intranets.
Schwartz is a hardcore blogger, and a damn good one. Mayfield’s company, SocialText, sells wikis. It makes sense, then, for each to favor his technology of choice as the replacement for intranets. The problem, though, is that wikis and blogs both operate on a web platform. Go ahead. Go to any blog or wiki you choose and, using your browser tools, view the source code. By God, it’s HTML, isn’t it? And what is an intranet? It’s a private web for your organization. Imagine that -— your intranet can have all the blogs and wikis your company can stand. But that doesn’t stop it from being an intranet, assuming your definition is “the web inside your company.”
Of course, the wiki/blog argument isn’t the first one to mistakenly spell the end of intranets. I can’t begin to count the number of people who have told me, “We don’t have an intranet any more. We’ve gone to a portal.” Sheesh. A portal is a front-end view of your intranet! It adds a lot of functionality (like personalization, customization, and the ability pipe a lot of content through portlets), but it’s still ultimately parsing HTML. In other words, portals, wikis, and blogs are all elements of intranets that evolve. They are not replacements.
As I noted here earlier, wikis and blogs cannot replace some of the functionality of an intranet. I have no doubt that Schwartz, if asked, would agree that the online budgeting process cannot be shoehorned into a blog and that a wiki is not the best foundation for a comprehensive, database-driven, searchable, knowledge-based employee directory. The number of applications that reside on intranets that employees use to manage their day-to-day activities is huge; they go well beyond knowledge sharing and collaboration.
Not that knowledge sharing and collaboration aren’t important; they’re vital, and more companies need to adopt tools like blogs and wikis that make it easy for employees to engage in both. But a robust intranet does more. For example…
The notion of wiki-as-intranet is based on ease of publishing. It’s the same motivation that leads the folks at some blog software companies to claim an intranet could be reconfigured 100% on blogging software. Both suggestions come from the “selling hammers” school of business solutions: If you’re selling hammers, every problem looks like a nail. But intranets are more complex beasts that cannot be supported by either platform alone. At least, not if they’re good intranets. For example…
- Applications —- I’ve maintained for years that few employees will visit an intranet just to read the company news. They’ll read the company news when they visit the intranet to do something work-related. On the best intranets, that includes streamlined work processes that have been webified. At a basic level, this includes interactive forms, calculators, data lookups, and the like. As noted earlier, benefits enrollment is a standard element of many intranets, and we’re not talking about just the form, but the ability to match healthcare providers to zip codes and a host of other functions. Expense reimbursement, performance evaluations, procurement, the job interview process, and a host of other work processes that have been moved online require some sophisticated programming.
- Portals —- The move to a portal environment is based on the idea of “portlets,” little self-contained windows into which data of just about any type can be piped, whether it’s static HTML content or current sales figures streamed in live from a database. While many portal initiatives have failed, many companies have terrific portals that allow employees to tailor the content they see to their work needs. Given the average of a year and $1 million to implement a portal, I can’t see many companies sacrificing the benefits to move to a blog or wiki environment.
- Static content—Some static web content requires some serious thinking around its navigation. Consider employee benefits information. Wikifying or blogging this content makes no sense, since there should be some hierarchical navigation that includes multiple paths to the same content. For example, you should be able to view medical benefits as a category and navigate quickly to the benefit you’re interested in; you should also be able to view a “Life Events” listing and see links to all relevant benefits, which may include some medical benefits. It should be the same block of copy; nobody should have to alter content twice when a single benefit changes.
- Interactive content —- I recently saw an intranet that contained a drop-dead fabulous marketplace section. Here, employees could interact with data using a variety of technologies (including a rare brilliant use of Flash) to learn about competitors, customers, the regulatory environment, and a variety of other aspects of the market in which the cmpany operates.
Of course, if you define the intranet as a bunch of static web pages, or a cumbersome, centrally-managed content management system, or a bunch of portlets without substance, then it’s easy to justify the claim that intranets will die. I simply reject these definitions. It’s like saying the World Wide Web will die and be replaced with blogs and wikis. Nonsense. The web is evolving to include blogs and wikis. Ditto intranets.
3. Honeywell Employees Are Blogging
Sometimes it’s difficult to convince management to embrace the idea of employee blogs when nearly all the examples you can offer come from high-tech companies. The kneejerk reaction of many executives (and not just to employee blogging initiatives) is, “We’re not a high-tech company.”
Thomas Nelson publishers has been the only solid example I’ve been able to offer of a more traditional business with an employee blogging network. Now I can also point to Honeywell, which so far has three bloggers on its network. The Honewell Career Blogs are touted as “a great way to gain a deeper level of understanding to the culture, people, work and environment of Honeywell.” So far, the employees blogging come from HR, marketing, and the company’s integrated supply chain. Focusing blogs on recruiting sounds like a great way to convince management of the value. Honeywell’s employee blogs are at http://honeywellblogs.com.
4. Putting Some Structure To Blogging
Search is an unholy mess. Even with advances from Google and others that represent quantum leaps over the days when HotBot and AltaVista sat atop the heap, search is still a frustrating and inefficient way to find what you’re looking for. Say you’re going to Sausalito and you want to find some reviews of hotels in the seaside town. So you hit Google and type in Sausalito, hotel and reviews. The results are a hodgepodge of pages that include reviews along with some that just include the word somewhere on the page.
That’s why, once I was able to understand it, the notion of XML seemed so exciting. If the travel industry agreed that the tag review would be used for reviews, then any computer parsing the code would recognize it as such, making it easy to separate out reviews from other content.
It’s working within the confines of XML specifications that have been adopted, but it’s not widespread enough to help the average person (that is, me) find just what I’m looking for. And, to complicate matters, there are now between 20 and 40 million blogs out there with with tons of great content that’s just as hard to sift through despite the great work being done by the various blog search engines.
At the Syndicate conference in San Francisco this week, Marc Canter of Broadband Mechanics introduced an initiative to do something about it. Called Structured Blogging, it involves using a standard form for blog entries that will help identify the nature of the entry and make it reusable based on whatever somebody is looking for. What that means, as far as I understand it (which may not be very far), a post of a movie review on your blog would look like any other post to your blog, but somebody retrieving all movie reviews would find them in a standard, common format.
Here’s how it’s explained on the initiative’s website:
“These styles and tags ensure that movie and book reviews don’t look like calendar or journal entries, and that each content type can be quickly recognized and processed by automated search services and other applications. Woven into the HTML of a blog post, this information travels with it through syndication feeds, readers, and aggregators. Ultimately, it can even be converted out to other formats our Structured Blogging tools support such as RDF in XML.”
Here’s one scenario describing the extent of the potential for Structured Blogging, described by Pamela Parker at ClickZ:
“You’re a marketer at a retail operation specializing in the latest fitness gear and apparel. You want to run a campaign promoting a sale you’re having on Saucony Grid Hurricane running shoes. So, you pull up your content management application. You select “offer to sell” from a drop-down box. Up pops a list of fields, which you fill in, one by one. You make selections for item type, brand, price, colors, sizes, etc. You hit “publish.” It appears on your company’s Web site. You wait.
“Meanwhile, a fitness content site is collecting offers to display in its “classifieds” section. Someone has asked to be alerted if Saucony Grid Hurricane shoes, in a women’s size 8.5, are offered below $90. That person gets a notification—perhaps on her instant messenger application—and a sale results.”
So far, the “microcontent types” defined by the initiative include reviews, events, lists, media (audio, video, images), and people and group showcases.
The initiative has some interesting participants, including PubSub (one of my favorite RSS tools), Bloglines, Feedster, SocialText, Rojo and Xanga, to name just a few.
So far, Structured Blogging plugins are available for WordPress and Moveable Type.
It didn’t take long for some people to throw cold water on the notion. Paul Kedrosky says it’ll never gain traction because people are too lazy to take the extra steps needed to apply it. Over at Corante, Stowe Boyd expects dozens of reasons for shrugging it off will emerge in the months ahead. I’ve also heard some criticism that suggests it’s an effort by a few to wrest control of the uncontrollable blogosphere.
I see two reasons why it could succeed, though. First, if the benefits are strong enough—that is, we fall in love with the kind of search results it gives us. This applies both to those doing the searching and to those (like many of us bloggers) who want our stuff to be found. Second, if all of the blogging applications make it dead easy by integrating it into their publishing interfaces, then those of us who want our stuff to be found more easily will have an added incentive. After all, many of us take the extra step to tag or categorize our entries when we don’t have to.
In any case, it’ll be interesting to watch the initiative unfold. There’s an associated blog that’s already listing reactions, as well as a restricted-access wiki where details are emerging.
5. “I’m Going TO Sue The Internet”
About eight or nine years ago, I was brought into a midwest financial institution to, among other things, speak with the executive team about the Internet. My goal was to help them understand the Net’s importance to business. Among other things, I showed them some unfavorable Usenet newsgroup posts about the company. The CEO was aghast. Seeing the CEO’s reaction, the general counsel stood up and said, “Don’t worry, sir. I’m going to sue the Internet.”
If you believe thinking like the top lawyer’s clueless threat has given way to higher levels of enlightenment, you probably haven’t seen the class action suit leveled against Wikipedia. The supporters of the suit have put out a call for individuals and organizations to join the suit if they have been the victim of inaccurate postings on the open-source encyclopedia:
“WikipediaClassAction.org is currently gathering complaints from the entire Internet community, including individuals, corporations, partnerships, etc., who believe that they have been defamed and or who have been or are the subject of anonymous and malicious postings to the popular online encyclopedia WikiPedia.
“Alternatively, if you are aware of postings on Wikipedia that are either untrue and or potentially libellous to another, please contact them and make them aware of the offending content and this website so that they may file a complaint with our group.”
The suit is troubling on a number of levels. If successful, it would have a significant chilling effect on open-source initiatives of any kind. But even more noteworthy is the mentality that underlies the suit: that somebody must be accountable for everything. Dana Blankenhorn has it exactly write in a commentary on ZDNet:
“Wikipedia is about open source information, knowledge that is held in common. The “scandal” involving John Seigenthaler gave him far more satisfaction than he would have gotten if he had been lied about in, say, The New York Times. The lie was taken down. Wikipedia apologized, The take-down got more publicity than the original lie. The liar was found and lost his job.”
I find it particularly interesting that the author of the Seigenthaler piece didn’t realize the Wikipedia was anything more than a satire and entered the false information as a joke aimed at a colleague. How many others who stumble on Wikipedia don’t have a clue what it is? When giving talks, I mention Wikipedia when introducing the subject of wikis; at least half the people in the room have never heard of it. And these are nearly always professional communicators.
Blankenhorn offers some remedies to the Wikipedia situation. People who use it should do what journalists do: Verify information with a second source. And Wikipedia should get a business model providing some resources to hire editors to police the site. (Of course, this means somebody actually would be accountable, subjecting Wikipedia to even more legal action.)
In any case, I hope the class action suit slips into the oblivion it deserves as the courts recognize the nature of open source material.
Speaking of courts, I also hope the $17.5 million lawsuit filed by Agence Press against Google finds its way into history’s dustbin. The idea that a search engine is violating copyright is ludicrous. Without search, the Web becomes an all-but-useless curiosity. I suppose the French press agency would prefer its content not be found. If the company is so worried about copyright violation, it could always remove its content from the press or take any one of a number of very simple actions to keep its content from being indexed by search bots. But the ridiculous suit has not kept the European Publishers Council from declaring war on search engines, with top dog Francisco Pinto Balsemao commenting in Brussels last week that publishers cannot continue to allow search engines to profit from their content:
“It is fascinating to see how these companies ‘help themselves’ to copyright-protected material, build up their own business models around what they have collected, and parasitically, earn advertising revenue off the back of other people’s content. This is unlikely to be sustainable for publishers in the longer term.”
With brain-dead thinking like this, it’s no wonder newspapers are in trouble.
6. Another City, Another Slam At PR
Here we go…the third incident I’ve reported recently in which a local entity has come under fire for the egregious sin of investing in public relations. This time, the culprit is Springfield, Massachusetts, where the Finance Control Board spent $10,000 to contract with one Paul J. Robbins to “chip away at the city’s image as a dangerous place,” according to a report in the Springfield Republican. Outraged by the expense were City Councilor Rosemarie Mazza Moriarty and the police patrolman’s union.
“A better use of the money would have been to pay overtime for a police officer or a civilian dispatcher, Councilor Rosemarie Mazza Moriarty said Friday. “To be able to hire a ‘public relations’ employee to spin the bad news is absolutely ludicrous,” Mazza Moriarty said.”
I doubt the engagement includes a requirement to “spin” anything; instead, reference to the PR perjorative is Moriarty’s own spin. (WWLP, the NBC affiliate in Springfield, had a different take on the arrangement.) But again, the situation symbolizes the PR profession’s image problem when the natural reaction to such a hire is that the city simply wants to spin situations rather than actually address them. Are the professional associations that represent the profession paying attention to these incidents?
7. Podcasts As Conversations
On the Frappr map for our podcast, one of the contributors offered this comment: “Love the show! Thanks for including us in the conversation.”
A conversation in a podcast? Not according to Steve Rubel, who comments about the possibility that a product-focused podcast is co-hosted by two fictitious characters: “I feel this approach is suitable for a podcast but not for a blog because it’s unidirectional.”
I disagree on a number of levels. In a nutshell:
- Not all blogs are mutlidirectional.
- Not all podcasts are unidirectional.
You can find a variety of definitions for the word online. The one I like is the simplest: “Talk between people,” although “the use of speech for informal exchange of views or ideas or information etc.” isn’t bad. The best conversations take place in real time, face-to-face or, at least, voice-to-voice. Instant messaging and SMS also fit the bill for real-time conversation.
Beyond these approaches, however, every online conversation is asynchronous, which simply means not synchronized. Both dimensions of blog conversations are asynchronous. They do not occur in real time.
The first dimension is contained within the blog. I write my post, log out, then dash off for a client meeting. You decide to check your RSS feeds, read my post and, after deciding you want to comment, visit my blog and contribute your thoughts. I don’t see your comments until I return that evening and, because of time zone differences, you’ve already gone to bed by the time I get around to answering you. The second dimension is blogospheric. You write a post. I read it and write about it myself on my own blog. You check your trackbacks the next day and see that three or four of us have written about your posts. By tomorrow, 20 more people may have written about my original post. It’s easy to monitor conversation in the blogosphere with tools like Technorati and Blogpulse.
In both cases, a real-time (or synchronous) conversation would have wrapped up in anywhere from a few minutes to a couple hours. In the online world, it can drag on for days. For all the discussion about the speed of the blogosphere, it’s relative. Compared to a real-time conversation, it moves at a glacial pace. Of course, the notion of drawing an audience the size of the blogosphere into a real-time conversation is absurd, hence the growth in the popularity of asynchronous channels over the last 20 years or so.
Once we understand that conversations slow down when they’re not in real time, the extent to which this channel or that one facilitate conversation is only a matter of degrees. Blogs may be slower than traditional bulletin boards as a conversation channel for a defined group of people, but they’re faster than podcasts. Podcasts are probably faster than other channels, like static web pages with feedback buttons. And where do wikis fall on the spectrum?
“The Hobson & Holtz Report” most definitely encourages conversation through a variety of channels, including the podcast blog and audio comments our listeners email to us. The pace of the conversation is slow—Monday and Thursday—because that’s how often we address the feedback we get. A-list podcasters like Adam Curry engage in even hotter conversations that transcend both media. Consider Curry’s current controversy over his efforts to alter how he was represented in the Wikipedia entry on podcasting’s history. The conversation about Curry’s actions began on blogs, but he responded on his podcast; his podcast explanation was a clearly defined element of the conversation. His earlier dialogues with listeners on topics such as biodiesel represent other examples of podcast-driven conversation.
Podcasts even spark conversations of the blogospheric nature, with one podcaster playing a clip of another’s show in order to comment on it. I’ve done this with Rubel’s show, for example.
To complicate matters, let’s consider blogs that are unidirectional. Randy Baesler’s Boeing blog comes to mind. Comments are turned off, and while other bloggers could certainly reference it, they don’t. It’s not even ranked on BlogPulse, and Technorati shows only 20 posts on other blogs in the last 241 days that reference “Randy’s Journal.”
One last consideration: Podcasting is 16 months old. Given adequate time, the medium will probably develop even more efficient means of building conversation.
Ultimately, it’s a vast oversimplification to suggest that blogs are multidirectional and podcasts are unidirectional. The notion of podcasts as a one-way medium is based on the the fact that they are recorded audio files to which listeners can only listen. But audiences can do more than just listen, and a blog post is, at the end of the day, nothing more than an archived bit of text that a blogger wrote and that readers read. The difference between them is based only on the sense (sound vs. sight) used to absorb the message, not in the audience’s ability to offer feedback to it.
Our listener who thanked us for including our audience in the conversation is exactly right, then. It’s not either-or; it’s just a matter of degrees.
8. Typography On The Web
A few years back, I included an item in my monthly email newsletter about a study on typefaces for the web. It was a small item, nowhere near the top of the newsletter, and I took no position on the result of the study. The study, if I remember it correctly, came out of a Texas university and concluded that serif fonts were best for body copy on the web mainly because it’s the font most readers are accustomed to seeing in print. Think about reading a page of sans serif in a magazine or book; it’s just wrong. The study involved test subjects reading web pages and concluding the serif fonts were easier to read.
Despite my matter-of-fact approach to reporting the study results, that little item produced more email than anything I’d written about since I started distributing an email newsletter back in around 1995. Typography arouses passion in communicators. At our hearts, most of us are craftspeople who started out writing and designing print publications. I still have a Pantone color swatch book in my desk drawer, and I can’t seem to get rid of my XActo knives, even though I couldn’t tell you how long it’s been since I’ve needed to slice up a galley. I used to spend hours poring over Communication Arts magazine. And like so many others, I devoted a fair amount of time to learning typography. (I go back to the days when we had to count headlines: fjilt were half counts, M and W were one-and-a-half; remember that?)
Scientifically speaking, there is no resolution to the serif vs. sans serif debate for web content, although most designers lean toward sans serif. You can find studies to support your choice, so they don’t help much. Personally, I’ve always leaned toward serif, but only at 12 pt. and above. Beyond the serif vs. sans serif debate, typography has been the oprhaned stepchild of web design, with few choices and little control.
Happily, I found a terrific article on web typography at Sitepoint. Written by London-based Multimap.com web developer Andy Hume, “The Anatomy of Web Fonts” goes into considerable detail about online type, but Hume manages to keep it understandable and engaging. Take his approach to the serif/sans serif issue:
“Serif fonts are very popular in print, and although there is a certain amount of debate regarding which family of typeface is most legible on the screen, I fall firmly in to the camp that believes that sans-serif faces are a more suitable option…The variable boldness and fine extra strokes of the serif fonts, particularly at smaller sizes of body text, often appear pixilated and untidy. This is still the case even with the most modern anti-aliasing techniques. With anti-aliasing enabled, the serif fonts look blurred (which is exactly what they are) around their curves and terminals. On the other hand, the straight, low contrast, open strokes of a sans-serif font, such as Verdana, will always leave a good impression on-screen.”
The article includes plenty of graphics to illustrate Hume’s points. Verdana, for example, was designed specifically for the screen and has plenty of space between letters (kerning) and within characters (glyphs). The article covers technical issues like additive and subtractive color systems (and why they matter), screen resolution, the inability to control final output (compared to print), and a variety of other topics. It also offers advice on choosing and implementing fonts, including applying Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to your work. For all you hard-core communication tacticians out there, it’s a piece worth bookmarking. As for me, I’ve never been married to serif fonts, and I can feel myself coming around to the sans serif camp.
9. Sites of the Month
Podzinger actually searches the voice file, translates it to text (presumably using some kind of voice-to-text application), then indexes the results. Clicking the highlighted word in the search results begins playing the podcast from that point; just clicking the “play” button starts the show at the beginning. The audio playback only works in Microsoft Internet Explorer; Podzinger will need to make it work in Firefox, too, but for a new offering in beta, it’s pretty slick. Podzinger’s a product of BBN, the company that is most responsible for development of the Internet.
When I first became aware of RSS, Corante was one of the first sites I found employing the technology. I was immediately hooked; Corante provided me with literally the first feed to which I ever subscribed. You can’t imagine how honored I am to be among the nearly two dozen marketing/PR bloggers invited to provide content to the Corante Marketing Hub, particularly considering the company I’m keeping. The other contributors include…
- Renee Hopkins Callahan (the Hub’s editor)
- * Elizabeth Albrycht
- Tom Asacker
- Toby Bloomberg
- Bruce Fryer
- Susan Getgood
- Neville Hobson (my podcast co-host)
- Christopher Carfi
- Lois Kelly
- Andrew Lark
- Mike Manuel
- Grant McCracken
- Michele Miller
- John Moore
- Johnnie Moore
- Jennifer Rice
- Evelyn Rodriguez
- Mary Schmidt
- John Winsor
- David Wolfe
Drop by for a visit!
10. HC+T Update
- I’m spending a week with the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation to help the communication staff get up to speed on new media.
- I’m speaking in January at Ragan’s Engagement conference.
- Other speaking engagements coming up include IABC/Des Moines, IABC/Colorado, the New Communications Forum, and the International Association of Online Communicators.
11. Boilerplate And Subscription Information
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