Article Book Review: The Numerati by Christopher Butler on January 16, 2009 I just finished reading The Numerati, by Stephen Baker. Baker, a former Business Week technology columnist, describes a new breed of companies seeking to gather and analyze the massive amount of data we create through work, shopping, voting, communicating, and even seeking love. He breaks the book up into chapters titled Worker, Shopper, Voter, Blogger, Terrorist, Patient, Lover. In some cases, you might be excited and encouraged by what can and will be accomplished by the math wizards that sift through our data. In other cases, it might be a bit frightening. Either way, I would recommend this book to anyone that might fit in to the above categories (that is, everyone), but certainly to anyone in our industry that has or will be involved in building applications that generate and/or process user data. It's fascinating. Here's a short video interview with the author, discussing The Numerati: You can also listen to an interview with Stephen Baker on the CBC podcast, The Spark. There is also a website and blog for the book at TheNumerati.net. Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Resource of the Month: Masterfile’s Endless Media by Justin Kerr on January 14, 2009 I've been playing with Masterfile's new proprietary search tool named Endless Media and it is a significant improvement over its competitors' offerings. Masterfile has rethought image searching from the ground up rather than simply adding new features to an existing engine. Read Now About
Article SEO Friendly Site Images published on January 14, 2009 When it comes to training clients on basics of SEO, it's easy to focus exclusively on textual content. However, proper use of image tags and accompanying descriptions is one easy way to take otherwise empty real estate in Google's eyes and convert it into valuable SEO fodder. This is especially true for agency designed sites that tend to be image and graphic heavy. Here are 4 good tips to follow: Read Now About
Article Why should someone with a job spend time with Linkedin? by Christopher Butler on January 9, 2009 This is why I think LinkedIn is great. I've posted before about LinkedIn's "answers" functionality, which I use all the time. Today I saw a question asked by Martin Brossman that I thought would be worth sharing: Here are a few strong points that come out of the 27 or so answers submitted to the question... Read Now About
Article How should E-Newsletter content be delivered? by Mark O’Brien on January 9, 2009 Do you go for the "entire newsletter in a single email" approach, or do you simply use your newsletter as a means to drive traffic to well-positioned pages on your site? Read Now About
Article Respond! by Christopher Butler on January 7, 2009 I just saw an interesting post from Wired's Epicenter blog discussing a new approach to user comments on blogs. The author points out that since social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, etc. pull in blog content and then allow for commentary to be posted about it, the feedback tends to come from smaller, more closed groups. In order to promote a wider, and perhaps more critical, pool of commentary, Jim Jeffers has started a project called Encouraged Commentary, which allows the user to highlight any text in order to be prompted with a 'respond' option. By clicking 'respond,' the user will be given a comment message box with their selection already formatted. This way, a user can respond with relevant comments (ideally), and not just, "nice post." Check it out. I think the idea is solid, I just wonder how they'll get people to start using it if most are already used to pulling blog content into other sites? Read Now About
Article The Case For a Marketing-Focused Agency Website published on January 5, 2009 Why should advertising agencies spend their valuable time making their own site an effective marketing tool? Because it is a sure-fire way to generate pre-qualified new business. Read Now About
Article To Buy or To Build by Christopher Butler on December 31, 2008 There are few things more satisfying than creating something from scratch. But sometimes, assembling existing components is actually the more efficient approach. Perhaps you don't have the luxury of starting from scratch; the raw materials and time needed to complete the job may far exceed the time and budget actually at your disposal. Or, perhaps someone else has already done some of the work you need to do, better than you could ever do it yourself! After all, we can't all be Tony Stark, right? Read Now About
Article The Warm Call published on December 23, 2008 Newfangled has gotten its marketing engine revved back up in a major and unprecedented way. Read Now About
Article Resource of the Month: 960 Grid System published on December 18, 2008 Decembers RotM is Nathan Smiths 960 Grid System website. You can download 12 and 16-column templates (based on a 960 pixel-wide grid) for several image and web applications, as well as a CSS framework with HTML demo. The site also displays some example sites (with grid overlays) built using the templates... Read Now About
