There's been some talk recently about what engagement means, if it can stand on its own as a metric, etc. The Advertising Research Foundation defines engagement as "turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context." Ruebel says that's hogwash. However, the real story here might be that most metrics rely on sleight of hand and fuzzy logic. For example, the Interweb is supposed to be the most …
Be Glad You Don’t Work For Gannett’s IT Department
For all of you skimming this post on a beautiful Friday afternoon, let's have a moment of sympathetic silence for the poor schleps who are "working around the clock" to solve this mysterious problem. You know the feeling, don't you? It's Friday, you want to go home, but the &^%$#@! Web site STILL won't work--and nobody knows why. From today's Editor & Publisher: Newspaper company Gannett has been having "severe" …
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I’ll Be Home By 11! Gosh!
Sprint will sell phones that can rat out your kids' whereabouts. It's the first service of its kind in the US. CNNMoney reports: The service lets parents look at maps on their cellphones or computers to locate their children who also carry mobile phones. Parents can also program the service to automatically send them text messages at specific times each day to confirm that their children have arrived at home or in …
Is The Web Hitting A Wall?
Working in advertising, I can't imagine a life without Internet. And in the process of moving cities recently, any time I spent without a fast connection nearby gave me panic attacks. Seriously. So this BusinessWeek article about Internet growth and resistance is fascinating to me. Many people are non-Netizens for obvious reasons. They can't afford service or live in remote areas without hope of affordable …
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: French Prefer Open Source
As reported by ZDNet UK, the French still dig independence. The French public sector has once again shown its love of open source with the news the gendarmerie — the French military police — is to switch to Firefox and Mozilla's email client Thunderbird. In an interview with the French magazine Linux Practique, the gendarmerie's head of IT, General Brachet, said his force will this year be using Firefox as its …
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Excite The Consumer And The Enterprise Will Follow
Always On Network has an interview with JotSpot CEO, Joe Kraus. Kraus is a serial entrepreneur, having been part of the Stanford alumni contigent behind Excite, Inc. Here are a few pearls of wisdom to consider from the Krause man. I really believe that the world of business software—let's call it enterprise software—is moving toward a model that I'll call the consumer enterprise. This is in many ways, I think, the …
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Surf’s Up In Estonia
c|net: "It is time to say that electricity and the Internet are very similar in end users' eyes," the sandy-haired Veljo Haamer said over a cup of smoky black tea. Haamer, one of Estonia's unofficial chief geeks, is largely responsible for a level of Wi-Fi connectivity-–even in remote areas-–that puts the biggest cities in America to shame. For the last three years, he and a handful of volunteer evangelists with the …
Got Dairy Farmer?
We Make Money Not Art: Farmers have teamed up with scientists to create a farm where the cows choose when they want to be milked using automated booths. The farmer can even go on holiday and allow the animals to look after themselves. "The cows set their own agenda," said Neil Rowe, manager of Manor Farm in Oxfordshire. "It’s about autonomy, it’s about enrichment, it’s about stepping back and allowing the cows and …
Mossberg Says DRM Reaches Too Far
Walter Mossberg for WSJ: In some quarters of the Internet, the three most hated letters of the alphabet are DRM. They stand for Digital Rights Management, a set of technologies for limiting how people can use the music and video files they've purchased from legal downloading services. DRM is even being used to limit what you can do with the music you buy on physical CDs, or the TV shows you record with a TiVo or …
WiMax Is EZ In Oregon
BBC: Recent figures suggest that since 2000, the US has dropped from third to 16th among nations worldwide in terms of per capita broadband access. Studies suggest that 86% of households with income of more than $75,000 have broadband access. But the share is just 38% for those with an income of less than $30,000. Municipal WiMax hopes to make on-demand information affordable/available to all. Ironically, one of the …