If you’re a manager who has been toying with the idea of video on your Website, now’s the time to get your feet wet. But be aware: You’ll be a pioneer. There is a lot to learn. Much of what we see isn’t very good, although some things are priceless. We asked Gary Arlen if he’d let us share an abbreviated version of his summary of Web video trends. He is President of Arlen Communications Inc.,  a Bethesda, MD, research firm.

Viewers of all ages are opting for the online video experience. An October study for Veoh Networks found that more than 40 percent of people who watch at least an hour per week of online video are aged 35 or older—including 13 percent over the age of 55.

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A few days ago we linked to Gapminder, a Swedish company specializing in animated graphs. Since then we’ve had a chance to peruse their site some more, and it’s opened our eyes to animation’s possibilities. Of course you can’t use animation in a printed document, but Gapminder’s method (now owned by Google and in part available for public use) seems to us a remarkably effective way to show trends in complex sets of data over time. Check out this presentation on changes in the developing world over the last fifty years.

Take special note of the moments when Hans Roslings, Gapminder’s director, separates the big bubble representing all of Africa into separate, smaller, country bubbles, and then further separates a single country into income quintiles. To get that much layered information before a reader in a print document would require a very skilled graphic designer, or several graphs for the reader to compare him- or herself.

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One of our recent posts quoted a WIRED magazine executive who wants publishers to hurry up and introduce sensemaking machines that present continually updated information in readily comprehensible ways.

If you haven’t had a chance to see one of the best such machines, check out the pioneering Gapminder, a website whose software was originally developed in Sweden. Google now owns the software, and the staffs merged last year.

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WIRED NextFest wrapped up in Chicago yesterday. If you missed it, you can still enjoy a catalog of innovations (PDF) that will make life more efficient, environmentally benign, and fun in the years to come.

With all the turmoil in the publishing industry, newspapers in particular, don’t be surprised at the absence of sleek, exciting presentations of text and graphic media.

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If any of your colleagues are less than 100 percent enthusiastic about your Web projects, here is how to light a fire under them:

Share the latest findings of the Digital Future Project (PDF), conducted for the past seven years by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.

Start with this:

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“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

If department store merchant John Wanamaker were alive today, he would find no shortage of firms wanting to sell him answers. The field of Web metrics (also called Web analytics) is exploding, as data analysts get better at sifting through data on site visits and telling Web content managers what they all should want to know:

• When people come to your site, what do they do?
• How do they feel about your organization and its Web site?
• How do you stack up against your competitors?
• What results from all these visits?

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It’s not the flame wars. It’s because even the most rewarding discussion list, Web board, wiki, or other online community can take forever to start. Like soggy charcoal briquettes.

For decades, I’ve been part of a world-wide community of professionals/developers who got our start in the pre-Internet days, when we used CONTACT, sophisticated collaboration software for mainframes. Its developer was a brilliant programmer, who did more than provide the tool: he jump-started the community by badgering people to participate every day. (”Whether you need to or not” was his refrain.)

He built critical mass, which was easily maintained for 20 years or so until the Internet arrived to replace CONTACT.

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Posted in Management of a publications enterprise, Technologies for publications and Web content 1 Comment »

Organizational life is full of outdated rituals, from office parties to annual performance reviews that do little to improve the quality of product, process, or personal experience. Technology can do away with many of them. For instance, an organization can do an online survey to find out how staff would really like to socialize. A manager can conduct a round of “exit interviews” after a project ends and provide feedback while the project is fresh in everyone’s mind.

One ritual may well go away on its own, the telephone call. Not the serious conversation with subtle, sensitive dimensions that must be conducted right away by two or more people who can’t meet. Or the pleasant, thirty-second, “Hi, are we still on for drinks at 7:00?” But perhaps the discussion of a topic that neither party understands very well, or the interminable conference call in which half the participants are multitasking and the rest are wondering who’s speaking and whether anything is really being accomplished.

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Taking their cues from wildly popular websites such as MySpace and Facebook, new services are using social networking for professional ends.

Consider Help A Reporter Out, a service that connects journalists to potential sources. If you crave publicity for your publication or website—who doesn’t?—acting as a source is a great way to achieve wide exposure.

The best part: it’s convenient and free.

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“Plagiarism is a serious and growing problem on the Web. At any moment, anyone in the world can copy your online content and instantly paste it onto their own site. After making minor changes, they will claim your content as their own.”

I freely admit that I copied the paragraph above from Copyscape, a website that deals with Internet plagiarism.

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